Arch Linux

Malvineous

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2011-02-03

Posts: 193

Website

Using Gentoo's etc-update to merge /etc/*.pacnew

Hi all,

Having looked through the Arch wiki for utilities to help merge *.pacnew files after an upgrade, I found that none of the utilities did what I was after.  They were either GUI based, required learning some new editor I would not use for anything else, or just plain didn't work.

Since I found Gentoo's etc-update CLI utility excellent for this sort of thing, I decided to port it from Gentoo to Arch.  This was fairly straightforward given the lack of dependencies, so it is now available in the AUR.

I like it because it has few dependencies, you can view diffs of the changes and interactively merge some hunks and not others, edit files using your preferred $EDITOR before merging and generally get files exactly the way you want before committing the changes to /etc.

If you've never used Gentoo you might find it takes a little while to get the hang of, but I think many people coming from Gentoo will like having it available.  Old habits die hard, and all that :-)

lifeafter2am

Member

From: 127.0.0.1

Registered: 2009-06-10

Posts: 1,332

Re: Using Gentoo's etc-update to merge /etc/*.pacnew

Interesting. I'll have to give it a shot next time I have pacnew's to merge.

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archvortex

Member

From: Bali, Indonesia

Registered: 2011-09-22

Posts: 3

Re: Using Gentoo's etc-update to merge /etc/*.pacnew

Worked perfectly and sooooo much faster than on Gentoo Thanks for adding this to the AUR!!

Last edited by archvortex (2012-01-29 09:16:33)

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"The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke

Arch+Openbox / Arch+emacs-nox / Gentoo + i3 /

kerios

Member

Registered: 2011-06-08

Posts: 17

Re: Using Gentoo's etc-update to merge /etc/*.pacnew

am i missing something? I have diffutils installed

  -> Found etc-update-arch_port.patch
==> Validating source files with md5sums...
    etc-update-arch_port.patch ... Passed
==> Extracting Sources...
==> Removing existing pkg/ directory...
==> Starting build()...
==> Downloading base versions from Gentoo SVN...
/tmp/packerbuild-1000/etc-update/etc-update/PKGBUILD: line 23: svn: command not found
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
    Aborting...
The build failed.

line 23 in PKGBUILD:

svn export ${_svntrunk}bin/etc-update

Malvineous

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2011-02-03

Posts: 193

Website

Re: Using Gentoo's etc-update to merge /etc/*.pacnew

Ah, I forgot to add svn as a dependency.  It downloads the code from the Gentoo SVN repo then patches it to work with Arch.

Edit: try now

Last edited by Malvineous (2012-01-29 10:01:55)

kerios

Member

Registered: 2011-06-08

Posts: 17

Re: Using Gentoo's etc-update to merge /etc/*.pacnew

thank-you!, works great, excellent addition.