I don't object at all, but I want to point out etcmanage, in pkgsrc, (which needs xz help), and does the same thing. A more or less fatal downside is that it is in perl, but I think it has very good semantics about etc merging. I have not kept up with the other methods, but in the past I found them too manual. To me, the right behavior is to know if each file in etc has been put there as a copy of a file that appeared in etc.tgz, and to change it to the new version without prompting if so, and if not, to note to the user that it might need attention. Perhaps sysupgrade/etcupdate does this, and if so great. But either way, sysupgrade is something people use, and upstream not doing maintenance and even worse requiring signing an agreement with google is a good reason to fork it.
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