Announcing yum-merge-conf, a yum plugin to merge configuration files

[Neal Becker]

Aurelien Bompard wrote:

> Dear Fedoreans,
> 
> Having followed the debate over whether to flag init scripts as %config
> files, I thought that there's a feature of another package manager that I
> liked: when a config file has changed, it asks you if you want to keep
> your local copy or if you want to install the package's version.
> RPM is non-interactive, so it's not supposed to do this. But I thought
> this could be implemented in a yum plugin.
> 
> I've written a plugin which does just this:
> http://gauret.free.fr/fichiers/rpms/fedora/yum-merge-conf/merge-conf.py
>
http://gauret.free.fr/fichiers/rpms/fedora/yum-merge-conf/yum-merge-conf-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
> 
> Add the --merge-conf command line option to your yum update, and it will
> ask you what to do with those .rpm{save,new} files as the packages are
> installed. You'll be able to diff the files, choose your version, or spawn
> a shell to check further.
> 
> If you think you could be interested in this feature, please have a look.
> If you think it's a useful plugin and it's decently written (it's my first
> yum plugin), I'll submit it to the yum list.
> 

This sounds great!  I haven't looked at the code yet.  Will it also ignore
cases when the new config hasn't actually changed, and silently remove the
redundant copy?  That would be really great.