Walt Mossberg Reviews Dell Ubuntu: "...still too rough around the edges..."

Re:Walt Mossberg Reviews Dell Ubuntu: "...still too rough ar... by papersmith on Friday September 14, 2007 @09:01PM (#54780)

You make a really good point.

I think one advantage a package management system has is unified updates. The down side is that could cause problems when configuration file formats change. Gentoo tries to handle this by managing all config files in CVS, so you can diff different versions and merge them. Luckily, in reality, config file formats don't change all that often.

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Re:Walt Mossberg Reviews Dell Ubuntu: "...still too rough ar... by bct on Friday September 14, 2007 @09:15PM (#54786)

> Gentoo tries to handle this by managing all config files in CVS, so you can diff different versions and merge them.

Am I missing something? I wish it did this, but unless something has changed recently it just gives you a tool for merging updates in (and doesn't store old revisions).

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Re:Walt Mossberg Reviews Dell Ubuntu: "...still too rough ar... by Elfan on Saturday September 15, 2007 @04:32PM (#54998)

dispatch-conf and etc-update are the two config updating tools included with gentoo's portage. dispatch-conf is the newer and preferred tool.

Be default dispatch-conf keeps a backup of your config files in /etc/config-archive. Optionally it can use rcs to track changes.

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Re:Walt Mossberg Reviews Dell Ubuntu: "...still too rough ar... by papersmith on Friday September 14, 2007 @10:37PM (#54812)

Oops, I keep forgeting this is not part of portage. This is done so often that it should really be made a sensible default for any mainstream distribution.

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