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Re: cygport: patches welcome?
On Jul 13 12:17, Dave Korn wrote:
> On 13 July 2007 12:11, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > I'm a bit reluctant to present a generic auto-merge. Consider the
> > situation where a new version of a package adds a new configuration
> > setting. An auto-merge would pull in the default setting for this
> > one, without the user knowing about this
>
> You mean like, for instance, sshd introduces a new vital security-related
> config option such as PrivSep and if the user doesn't know to turn it off
> manually it gets enabled by default? Sounds like a good thing to me ....!
There are other packages which just change their default behaviour
because the upstream author thinks it's a good idea, not because it has
any security impact.
> (Plus it's not any different from the situation where the user installs the
> package for the first time and doesn't bother to customize the config).
Not quite. The situation we're talking about is one in which the user
*did* care and changed the config file to his or her own needs. When a
new release just merges in changes without notifying the user about
this, it's not exactly nice.
> I know the idea of automerge is scary.
Yes, indeed. Think of complex files like /etc/profile or /etc/csh.cshrc.
How do you make sure that a merge didn't just work (patch returned
without error), but that the merge actually had a still working result?
I think merging is not feasible for all files in /etc.
> I guess we should make sure there's
> a very very easy roll-back mechanism that we can point users at if something
> goes wrong and that would just restore their prior config exactly as it was
> before the merge.
If we really do merges, a merge should always generate a copy of the
original file and setup should notify the user. The way Andrew
described it would still be a good thing, even if an auto-merge went
fine.
Corinna
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat