--- Justin Dugger [email protected] wrote:

Debian packages occasionally update their config files, along with the binaries and documentation. This is typically annoying, because the changes are most often commented lines. I've never seen a program dramatically change its conf file structure to warrant keeping the new changes, but sometimes they do add new variables and default settings for them. Debian gives you the option to view the diff in any case, and if you aren't certain, its almost always advisable to keep the current config file. If I remember correctly, apt/dpkg is not intelligent enough to merge the two, so your choices are typically take the new comments or keep your customizations.

Yeah, this is really annoying. Especially if you are running a testing/unstable debian like Mepis. The solution I've come up with is to save the old config file, let apt-get update the config file and then extract the lines I want fom the old config and merge into the new config. I do this only when the new config has features that need to be included to makke the updated package work. Making a merge config function would be an extremely difficult task to perform. The best solution I can think of would be an option to merge files based on user input. Like you could do a diff and then say "merge lines x-y from old conf into new conf" or "replace lines u-v from new with lines w-z from old". Which would still be a bit of a pain.

Brian D.

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