freebsd-update from 8.3-RELEASE to 9.0-RELEASE: How to deal with dozens of diffs?

Question

I am upgrading a FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE system to FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE using freebsd-update. This is my first time performing a major version upgrade in FreeBSD.

At one point in the process, freebsd-update performs a diff on files which are different then what is expected for the 9.0-RELEASE. It compares the current version on the system with the new changes added from 9.0-RELEASE. I have a modified a couple dozen files under /etc, and I am presented with this diff once per file.

Thus, I am presented with dozens and dozens of diffs which open in a vi window and look like this:

The following file could not be merged automatically: /etc/ntp.conf
Press Enter to edit this file in vi and resolve the conflicts
manually...

### vi window opens

<<<<<<< current version
driftfile /etc/ntp/drift
=======
#
# $FreeBSD: release/9.0.0/etc/ntp.conf 195652 2009-07-13 05:51:33Z dwmalone $
#
# Default NTP servers for the FreeBSD operating system.
#
# Don't forget to enable ntpd in /etc/rc.conf with:
# ntpd_enable="YES"
#
# The driftfile is by default /var/db/ntpd.drift, check
# /etc/defaults/rc.conf on how to change the location.
#
>>>>>>> 9.0-RELEASE

restrict default notrust nomodify ignore

And it complains about minor version numbers:

--- current version
+++ new version
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-# $FreeBSD: src/gnu/usr.bin/man/manpath/manpath.config,v 1.25.28.1 2009/04/15 03:14:26 kensmith Exp $
+# $FreeBSD: src/gnu/usr.bin/man/manpath/manpath.config,v 1.25.32.1 2010/12/21 17:10:29 kensmith Exp $
 #
 # This file is read by manpath(1) to configure the mandatory manpath,
 # optional manpath and to map each path element to a manpath element.
 # The format is:
 #
Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y

And so on.

This requires that I manually edit each file and remove the strings like <<<<<<< current version >>>>>>> 9.0-RELEASE and =======, and manually merge these files. As I discovered afterwards, if I don't remove these strings, they end up in the file afterwards. There are dozens of files which differ between 8.3 and 9.0, and I have a dozen local modifications myself.

It appears that freebsd-update is using a diff, sdiff or mergemaster function of some sort, but I can't tell what it is doing exactly.

Processing these files is tedious. Is there a way that I can just say "Accept new version" or "keep old version" or "Your merge is correct"? There has got to be an easier way to deal with these files. I must be missing something.

This isn't a huge problem for one machine, but eventually I'll be doing this dozens of times and I want to find an easier way.

Update:

Looks like these diffs are managed by merge(1), not mergemaster. From the merge(1) manpage:

   A conflict occurs if both file1 and file3 have changes in a common seg-
   ment of lines.  If a conflict is found, merge normally outputs a  warn-
   ing  and brackets the conflict with <<<<<<< and >>>>>>> lines.  A typi-
   cal conflict will look like this:

      <<<<<<< file A
      lines in file A
      =======
      lines in file B
      >>>>>>> file B

Answer 1

I wasn't getting much response here, so I asked at forums.freebsd.org.

The short answer is: No. There is no easy way to merge these changes using freebsd-update. freebsd-update uses merge(1) to perform the diffs and merging, and merge is not very friendly or flexible.

There are other options, such as sysutils/etcupdate as suggested by kworr. However, I don't see how that can be integrated with freebsd-update.

From what I read, freebsd-update is a convenient way to upgrade FreeBSD, but it fails in other ways. Many FreeBSD admins perform major version updates using the source and mergemaster(8).

Answer 2

I would agree that in many cases, the older way will give less trouble; that is, if you're upgrading from a non-RELEASE "branch", major version upgrades, etc.

But freebsd-update is "da schiz" for keeping a RELEASE-branch system current with security patches (or, in other words, a production machine/server).

Anytime you update from something more than a few months old there are likely some changes to files in /etc --- the older way uses "mergemaster", which is slightly more friendly that merge, but updating merges to /etc/ files that have been modified is always going to be a PITA that requires a good bit of manual intervention. It's just that mergemaster is a tad (only a tad) more "user-friendly".

Answer 3

There's a good thing named sysutils/etcupdate in the ports. It can do a semi-auto three-way merge of your configs requiring minimal involvment.