up2date force option

[Mertens, Bram]

Hi,

Our servers are being patched by our outsourcing partner using a tool called opsware.  This is as far as I'm being told and have observed basically a slightly modified version of up2date with its own repositories.

A while ago on a server that was patched at least one configuration file (/etc/logrotate.d/httpd) was replaced by the one in the RPM package.  I would have expected up2date to preserve the modified file and create a .rpmnew file.

In the logwatch output of another server I see that they use the force option to up2date.  The update directory contains kernel packages which are skipped by default so the use of the option itself makes sense.
I just want to double check - because I can't find details about the force option other than what the man page says - that the --force option changes RPM's default behaviour of how to treat files marked as configuration files or not.

So what does "override the file, package and configuration skip lists" mean exactly?
       -f, --force
              Force  package  installation.  This option is provided so
              that you can override the file, package and configuration
              skip lists.

pkgSkipList, fileSkipList and removeSkipList are options in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date.  I understood --force to ignore these lines.
However I cannot find a corresponding configuration skip list.

There is noReplaceConfig but the comment "When selected, no packages that would change configuration data are automatically installed" is not really clear to me.

Regards

Bram



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