giles@topaz.nemeton.com.au (Giles Lean) writes:
> I encourage you to submit the name of an OS in which non-trivial OS
> upgrades are this automated.  I've not met one in the last 10 years,
> but maybe you have.  If so we'll look it over for ideas. :-)

BSDI 2.1 -> BSDI 3.0 upgrades of /etc are done via patching your old
diffs into the new files.

In my case, it made a royal mess of things leaving some 10-20 reject
files.  Fixing the sometimes 50-line long patch hunks in a 24x80 ascii
single-user mode window without ediff etc. was such a chore that I
threw in the towel and ended up scrubbing the disk and attempting the
install as a new install instead.

So such tools do exist.  Its not clear you ever want them near your
files.  It would have prefered if Unix booted in a vanilla fashion and
let one upgrade the rest of the /etc files using a nice environment.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    <wolfgang@wsrcc.com>     http://www.wsrcc.com/
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