Re: [PATCH] review requested, add a feature to mergemaster

[Anton Berezin <tobez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 03:34:50PM -0500, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> At 2:53 PM +0100 1/12/05, Anton Berezin wrote:
> >Following the idea by Sune Stjerneby, suggestions from Andrzej
> >Tobola and Phil Regnauld, and a bit of discussion on -current,
> >I would like to request a review of a new mergemaster feature
> >aimed to simplify manual work in some cases.
> >
> >A new option is added:
> >
> > -R cvsroot  For files that contain a $FreeBSD$ string,
> 
> Hmm.  I'm not sure how useful this will be (not that I object
> to it in anyway, I'm just not sure...).

Depending on the amount of tinkering done to /etc files, which is an
undertemined function of machine function, administrator preferences and
local policy, it should in theory substantially reduce pointless
qi<enter>, which are not only time-consuming, but also tend to make an
admin less attentive, possibly resulting in qi<enter> *OOPS* (I've done
that in the past).

A single, probably not very useful datapoint: install 5.3-RELEASE,
cvsup to RELENG_5, {build,install}{world,kernel}, then do mergemaster.
This currently leads to about 20 cases of "pointless diffs", all of
which go away when using this option.

If a concern is that only a minority of machines have /home/ncvs
installed, then the answer would be that "cvsroot" is a generic string,
which can be anything cvs -d accepts, meaning that various :pserver: and
:ext:-based solutions shall work.

> But let me note:

> >+For files that contain a $FreeBSD$ string,

> Be careful when trying to add the literal string of $FreeBSD$ to any
> documentation file.  This will look fine when you are testing it, but
> when you *commit* it, CVS will expand that string into the
> FreeBSD-version information for that file.

Thanks, that shall be changed to just "$FreeBSD", as it already appears
elsewhere in the manual.

\Anton.
-- 
The moronity of the universe is a monotonically increasing function. --
Jarkko Hietaniemi