woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) writes:

> [ On Tuesday, June 26, 2001 at 20:27:19 (-0500), Frederick Bruckman wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: Upgrading NetBSD?
> >
> > Speaking of "defaults for years", sysinstall supports upgrades now. In
> > addition to all of the above, it will move your old "/etc" to
> > "/etc.old", install the new "/etc", and delete any obsolete files
> > (binaries that have changed location &c). It's fairly painless if you
> > can get the sets over ftp, or nfs, or if you can put them on a
> > seperate partition.
> 
> It sure would be nice if those procedures were implemented separately,
> eg. as a nice little shell script, so that those of us who don't want to
> use sysinstall can still at least read the procedcure, if not even use
> it, separately.

Speaking of which: it would be cleaner if there were fewer files in
/etc so that the ones that have been locally modified stood out
better.

F.i. instead of having the system source /etc/monthly.conf, which then
sources /etc/defaults/monthly.conf (if it exists) it would be better
if the system sourced /etc/defaults/monthly.conf, which then sourced
/etc/monthly.conf (if it exists). In the latter case /etc would be
empty unless there was a local modification.

Likewise, for things like /etc/wscons.conf (which isn't a script and
hence cannot source another script) it would be possible to enhance
/etc/rc.d/wscons to first look for a config i /etc/wscons.conf and if
not found fall back to look for one in /etc/defaults/wscons.conf

That way the number of files in /etc that have to be examined for
local changes would go down significantly.

Regards,

Johan