I just went through this for my first time and my biggest complaint is that going through all the /etc/ diffs was tedious and seemed error-prone. I kind of can't imagine repeating that process on a bunch of servers, so maybe there's a batch/ahead-of-time way to deal with those diffs?
Also, it appeared to only show the diff between my (usually modified) config files and the "new" files, but I'd actually like to see the diff between the old (unmodified) and the new, so that I can discern which changes are "mine" versus "recommended as part of the upgrade". Anyone know if that's possible?
I haven't followed closely the NetBSD space for a while, but in FreeBSD, the tools that merge etc changes can be told to auto-merge files that aren't locally modified, which skips most of the noise. And since I started using freebsd-update (instead of make installworld), I haven't seen any of the /etc conflict resolution stuff any longer. I suppose pkgbase also makes this a non-issue and you then occasionally deal with conflicting updates (which is a thing in other systems; e.g. Debian).
But on the topic of /etc updates, there is also the issue that /etc contains... code that I think shouldn't be there, but because it's there, it triggers unnecessary "manual" merges. See https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html for a bit on this topic.
jmmv | 21 hours ago
Glad to see that the sysupgrade script I wrote years ago is still in use and works!
jaredkrinke | 22 hours ago
I just went through this for my first time and my biggest complaint is that going through all the
/etc/diffs was tedious and seemed error-prone. I kind of can't imagine repeating that process on a bunch of servers, so maybe there's a batch/ahead-of-time way to deal with those diffs?Also, it appeared to only show the diff between my (usually modified) config files and the "new" files, but I'd actually like to see the diff between the old (unmodified) and the new, so that I can discern which changes are "mine" versus "recommended as part of the upgrade". Anyone know if that's possible?
jmmv | 20 hours ago
I don't know how people handle this at scale...
I haven't followed closely the NetBSD space for a while, but in FreeBSD, the tools that merge etc changes can be told to auto-merge files that aren't locally modified, which skips most of the noise. And since I started using freebsd-update (instead of make installworld), I haven't seen any of the /etc conflict resolution stuff any longer. I suppose pkgbase also makes this a non-issue and you then occasionally deal with conflicting updates (which is a thing in other systems; e.g. Debian).
But on the topic of /etc updates, there is also the issue that /etc contains... code that I think shouldn't be there, but because it's there, it triggers unnecessary "manual" merges. See https://jmmv.dev/2020/08/rcd-libexec-etc.html for a bit on this topic.