On Apr 21,  9:43am, Greg A. Woods wrote:
} [ On Friday, January 4, 2002 at 17:09:52 (-0500), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
} >
} > the whole point of having a /etc/defaults directory and then a layer
} > above that people can wreck is that systemic upgrades *won't* require
} > a three-way merge.  i like it the way it is.  i guess we'll have to
} > disagree.  :-/
} 
} Since we were talking about the /etc/rc.d/* scripts, and how to go about
} better supporting upgrades in face of end-user changes to these scripts,
} you simply cannot avoid a three way merge without adding so much
} complexity that there's not likely any chance anyone would ever modify
} the scripts in the first place.

     I just did an upgrade on a Solaris system.  What it did in some
cases was to rename something to X.old and put in a new X and in other
cases it kept my X and just created an X.new.  It logged all this and
left it to me to sort out.  This obviously isn't a completely automated
system, but it did preserve changes during the upgrade.  I assume it
had some kind of database (md5 hashes?) so that it could determine what
was changed.

}-- End of excerpt from Greg A. Woods