[2203] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Re: alternate packs/config proposal for Linux
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Mon Oct 5 15:36:22 1998
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: sipb-source-reviewers@MIT.EDU, linux-dev@MIT.EDU
From: amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko)
Date: 05 Oct 1998 15:31:02 -0400
In-Reply-To: Greg Hudson's message of "Mon, 05 Oct 1998 15:17:43 EDT"
[linux-dev added to Cc: line]
Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU> writes:
> > What approach do you take on IRIX? Does it deal with vendor changes
> > to files you modify?
>
> It's the same as on other platforms, and no, not currently.
Hmm...Red Hat updates some config files often enough that I'd prefer
to be able to deal smoothly with those updates.
> I have an innovation in mind for supporting local changes (whether
> made by the vendor or by the local administrator) to sufficiently
> structured config files. (A free-form config files like /root/.cshrc
> is pretty much a lost cause.) It's described in [2012] in athena-ws,
> although I've recently started to worry about some design problems
> with it (briefly, mkserv's editing of files in-place may interfere
> with failure recovery during updates).
That also looks like a good idea....
> I have some concerns about your approach. First, anything using
> "patch" (which is, fortunately, nothing) will generally bomb out if
> the user has edited anything around the area to be patched.
True. :-(
> sed scripts can be more robust, but your sed scripts are neither
> idempotent nor reverseable, leaving us in a difficult situation for
> updates.
apply-patch saves the original version of the file in a known place,
so that's not really an issue.
--
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC <amu@mit.edu> (finger amu@monk.mit.edu)
