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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Command Line Versus Command Line
Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2024 00:20:01 -0000 (UTC)
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On 8 Jun 2024 00:12:07 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Jun 2024 23:53:57 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> 
>> I have had accidents with rsync, too. But it’s still a wonderful tool
>> that I wouldn’t want to be without.
> 
> It was on Windows so it wasn't rsync but our support people had a
> similar tool. They would edit configuration files on the server and then
> copy them to all the other machines. Tough shit if another machine had
> been configured differently for some reason.

See, the Debian installer has a procedure for dealing with this when 
upgrading a package: it compares the config files being potentially 
overwritten with the default ones from the old package being replaced; if 
they match, they can be safely overwritten by the new package. Otherwise 
you get asked what you want to do: leave your changes in place, or 
overwrite them, or something else.

But of course that only works for configs kept as text files, which can be 
easily diff’d to identify changes.