On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 08:22:14AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I wrote 'etcmanage' to deal with this problem somewhat, and have been
> using it happily.  It installs new versions of files in /etc (from a
> distribution/destdir build) if the version in /etc is recorded as
> previously automatically installed.  This lets me not think about
> things that I never touched, which means that I do get to think about
> things that I did touch.  I have a build script that does a tools
> build, destdir build, and build to /, followed by automatic invocation
> of etcmanage.

The actual trick is to ensure that you never 'install' and editable file,
you only create a default is it is absent.
Also try not no have files that contain system data and user-editable stuff.
Sometimes it is worth changing the way things work to avoid this.

> It would be cool if passwd/group and perhaps some other files that
> have explicit 'set of lines' semantics could get this treatment on a
> line-by-line basis.

A modified useradd (don't bleat if this exists) and a groupadd would
do the work.

> http://www.ir.bbn.com/~gdt/etcmanage/index.html

That is a lot of c$@p for 5k....

> (This is in perl and a bit buggy - it needs to be run multiple times
> to converge since it modifies a db while iterating over it, but that's
> a SMOP to fix.)

For system use perl is out....
Sysinst does't hame md5... (maybe it should but it doesn't).

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk