Daemon News Ezine BSD News BSD Mall BSD Support Forum BSD Advocacy BSD Updates

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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



At 10:17 PM +0100 1/12/05, Anton Berezin wrote:
On Wed, Jan 12, 2005, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
 > At 2:53 PM +0100 1/12/05, Anton Berezin wrote:
 > >
 >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...).


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.

I understand the desired goal.  I'm just not sure that this
option will be generally useful.

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.

If a user is following the rules for upgrading, then the really
important mergemaster run is done in single-user mode.  You do
not have networking, you do not have NFS, you do not even have the
any value set for `hostname`.  Thus, if that user does not have
the cvs repository on their local hard disk, then this option will
require several additional steps (and those steps may not be
convenient, particularly for someone who gets their network
address via DHCP).

Again, let me point out that I am not objecting to this idea.  I am
only saying that it may not be as useful as it first seems to be.

 > 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.

Sounds good.  That was the main purpose of my message.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx