IMnsHO, teach this person to use the tools already available: both nano, diffutils and less are part of base. Teach person to use "diff -u" combined with less and to excersise some judgement about the difference between the working copies and the new files. Most of the time it is a matter of jotting down a couple of lines in a piece of paper (anathema!!!!) and edit the already working file to add a couple of lines or change a couple of settings to new defaults. Make sure to emphasize the use of "nano -w" and you won't have broken lines in the config files. On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 3:43 AM, Paul Gideon Dann <pdgiddie@gmail.com>wrote:
Hi guys,
I run a couple of Arch servers, and I'm trying to teach someone how to go about maintaining it (for when I'm not around). The difficulty is that when it comes to package updates that require merging .pacnew files, I always use Vim to merge changes. That's quite a steep learning curve to impose on someone who's not all that familiar with a UNIX environment yet. Does anyone know of any good & simple(ish) alternative for merging files over SSH?
Paul