Arch Linux

paranoos

Member

From: thornhill.on.ca

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 442

new pacman - NoUpgrade obsolete?

I noticed some time ago that there was a new version of pacman, and I'm glad to see it in the repos today.

One of the new features is that by default, pacman will keep your modified config file, and save the new config as a .pacnew, which i'm sure will please many, many people (it's one of the biggest complaints I hear about pacman, although things have been quiet for some time).

Anyway, I installed it, and noticed the new pacman.conf still has NoUpgrade lines. The default behaviour now is basically NoUpgrade, so I'm wondering if this is now obsolete.

While I defended pacman's behaviour--overwrite user-modified config with a new one--to the death, I'm still glad to see this change. In a majority of cases, it makes system maintenance simpler.

Romashka

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2005-12-07

Posts: 1,054

Re: new pacman - NoUpgrade obsolete?

NoUpgrade is still working.
If you have some config file, that you never modified (you just leaved default config), and you don't want it to be upgraded by Pacman automatically due to changes in package's default config - you may use NoUpgrade in this case (who knows, maybe package's new default config file will have some changes that can affect security and you are very paranoid sysadmin ).

I think it is safe to remove all NoUpgade options from default pacman.conf.
If user changes some of the files listed there then they will be not overwritten by Pacman 2.9.8+ anymore.
If user didn't make any changes in those files then new versions of those files will most likely be the same or just slightly modified, so all will be working fine.

When I was upgrading my system with the new Pacman I noticed that rc.local was not upgraded but rc.local.pacnew was made. But I've never modified my rc.local (as far as I remember). And sometimes there was no changes in th default rc.conf from initscripts, but rc.conf.pacnew was always created. So I removed rc.local and rc.conf from NoUpgrade and now pacman does not create useless rc.local.pacnew on each initscripts upgrade and does not create rc.conf.pacnew when the default rc.conf was not changed.
Then I removed my quite large NoUpgrade list completely. And since that time Pacman hasn't done any mistake. It upgrades only untouched config files and saves .pacnew for config files that received some changes in defaults (like the latest changes of mkinitrd.conf and Apache's config files). I like this behaviour very, very much. It is much easier for me to upgrade all my 5 systems now (4 of them are on VMware, one in my second company, and very soon there will be one at home).  8)
I even say - all NoUpgrade options should be removed from user's pacman.conf if he/she does not wants to have .pacnew when there is no need for them.

I was one of those who wanted this new change in Pacman for a long time. There was few long discussions on bugs.archlinux.org, and finally the change was made! Many thanks to Pacman developers!

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