[LUAU] mergemaster

[Vince Hoang]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:53:44PM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:
> For this reasons, and given my technical bent, gentoo (and emerge)  
> seems a better solution than debian + 'apt', but even emerge pales in  
> comparison to
> FreeBSD's 'cvsup; make world; make kernel; ...' (though 'mergemaster'  
> sucks rocks).   Given that the gentoo original mission was to  
> recreate the BSD 'make' system, and the resultant de-railing when the  
> gentoo system started to require python in order to build, this seems  
> like the natural order of things.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html

"Although the world target still exists, you are strongly
encouraged not to use it."

> Even 'mergemaster' isn't perfect, I recently managed to take the  
> FreeBSD box from 5.4 to 6.0RC1, but it needed a little 'help' via  
> "remote hands", since mergemaster had given me a /etc/groups
> file where I was no longer in /etc/group, and I hadn't (yet)  
> installed 'sudo' on the box.   Presto, no way to become root except  
> on the console.

What is a sane alternative to mergemaster? Updating /etc is a
PITA without it. Correction, updating /etc is less of a PITA
with it. 

I am glad gentoo has a cousin to it, etc-update, rather than
forcing you to run find and manually performing left/right
merges.

-Vince