Hi,

I thought it would be useful to let etcupdate create the hashes used to
check if a file has been locally modified as the first thing that is done
on a newly installed system. This way you get the hashes of the original
files, so that you don't unnecessarily have to manually review files or
risk to overwrite local changes during a later update. (rc.conf is usually
modified by sysinst, so it would be hashed in a modified state. However you
probably have to touch this file pretty quickly anyway, so this shouldn't
be a problem.)

However it turns out that etcupdate doesn't have a switch to create the
hashes without performing an update. Performing an update to create the
hashes is both unnecessary because (nearly) all files are in original and
uptodate state and bothersome because you had to extract the etc set again
or copy /etc.

etcupdate normally operates on the new etc set that was extracted to a
tempdir. But it seems that it could operate on the main /etc for the case
of creating the hashes after a fresh installation. So there should probably
be an option to make etcupdate do exactly that.

With this new option etcupdate could even run automatically at the end of
sysinst, so you wouldn't need to remember to run it before starting to
configure the system.

Comments?

Please CC me on reply.

Bye, Chris