On Tuesday 30 Jul 2013 14:26:31 phanisvara wrote:

On Tuesday 30 Jul 2013 09:43:02 Paul Gideon Dann wrote:

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Does anyone know of any good & simple(ish) alternative for merging files over SSH?

nano, or mc with it's in-built editor.

They don't have a diffing/merging mode, do they? Paul

* phanisvara [30.07.2013 11:41]:

On Tuesday 30 Jul 2013 10:31:03 Paul Gideon Dann wrote:

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nano, or mc with it's in-built editor.

They don't have a diffing/merging mode, do they?

no; i thought for somebody not used to managing arch, it would be better to do things manually, or not at all.

often you can leave .pacnew files alone w/o anything bad happening. otherwise, before merging, it's better to read thru' the files and understand what's happening, was my idea.

Before you do nothing, it's better if you use e.g. pacnew_scripts (is in the AUR).

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 5:40 AM, phanisvara wrote:

On Tuesday 30 Jul 2013 10:31:03 Paul Gideon Dann wrote:

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nano, or mc with it's in-built editor.

They don't have a diffing/merging mode, do they?

no; i thought for somebody not used to managing arch, it would be better to do things manually, or not at all.

often you can leave .pacnew files alone w/o anything bad happening. otherwise, before merging, it's better to read thru' the files and understand what's happening, was my idea.

-- phani.

You'll still be manually merging the files with a merging tool, it will just give you context and an up-to-date delta as you go.

On Tuesday 30 Jul 2013 10:58:21 Chris Down wrote:

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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? Well, what merge programs are they familiar with? If it is vimdiff that

On 2013-07-30 09:43, Paul Gideon Dann wrote: poses the problem for this user, you might consider running meld instead.

Thanks Chris, but this is a headless server; Xorg is not installed, so meld is out. Paul

[2013-07-30 10:32:40 +0100] Paul Gideon Dann:

On Tuesday 30 Jul 2013 10:58:21 Chris Down wrote:

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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? Well, what merge programs are they familiar with? If it is vimdiff that

On 2013-07-30 09:43, Paul Gideon Dann wrote: poses the problem for this user, you might consider running meld instead.

Thanks Chris, but this is a headless server; Xorg is not installed, so meld is out.

You could mount the server's filesystem locally using sshfs and run meld on that. But in my opinion learning to use a powerful text editor is really a must for system administrators... -- Gaetan

On 30 July 2013 16:33, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:

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.

The only diff tool comparable to vimdiff that comes into my mind is emacs diff mode.

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 3:54 PM, P. A. wrote:

On Tue, 2013-07-30 at 20:05 +0200, Lukas Jirkovsky wrote:

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On 30 July 2013 16:33, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:

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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" ...

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The only diff tool comparable to vimdiff that comes into my mind is emacs diff mode.

You are correct, but both vimdiff and emacs diff mode are sophisticated crutches.

They're not "crutches", they offer an elegant presentation of the differences between the files, and you can merge the changes one-by-one without losing context. It only takes a few minutes to learn, and you'll be happy you did.

You should learn the basic tools to be able to understand the sophisticated ones later and make good use of them.

That's absolutely untrue, there's no secret knowledge you'll gain from torturing yourself with an awful tool. It's only useful for generating patches, not merging files.

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia

Matter of opinion. I value learning from first principles. From that point of view: merging graphical tools are crutches if you don't have the foggiest idea of what is actually going on underneath. If you arrived at a later stage of the computer OS evolution game, graphical tools are what you know and that's the hammer you use to hit all nails. My hammer is vi, btw. Not vim; plain, old fashioned vi.

There's absolutely no part of the merging process `vimdiff` is hiding from you. You're enamoured with doing tedious, repetitive work but most of us would rather invest a few minutes in learning a more powerful tool or writing a bit of code than wasting our time.

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Daniel Micay wrote:

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There's absolutely no part of the merging process `vimdiff` is hiding from you. You're enamoured with doing tedious, repetitive work but most of us would rather invest a few minutes in learning a more powerful tool or writing a bit of code than wasting our time.

And you are enamoured with trying desperately to prove random, unknown people in the internet that you are right, because you have being given the divine right to be always correct as dispensed to you by God.

Child, I stopped doing that several decades ago. You win by default.

-- http://about.me/palopezv

It's a mailing list, we don't care how many years of experience you claim to have. I only care that you're telling people to waste their time by suggesting they do merges with pen and paper instead of tools in the repositories supporting the workflow of a merge.

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 6:41 PM, Leonid Isaev wrote:

On Tue, 30 Jul 2013 18:11:05 -0400 Daniel Micay wrote:

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On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:

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On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Daniel Micay wrote:

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There's absolutely no part of the merging process `vimdiff` is hiding from you. You're enamoured with doing tedious, repetitive work but most of us would rather invest a few minutes in learning a more powerful tool or writing a bit of code than wasting our time.

And you are enamoured with trying desperately to prove random, unknown people in the internet that you are right, because you have being given the divine right to be always correct as dispensed to you by God.

Child, I stopped doing that several decades ago. You win by default.

-- http://about.me/palopezv

It's a mailing list, we don't care how many years of experience you claim to have. I only care that you're telling people to waste their time by suggesting they do merges with pen and paper instead of tools in the repositories supporting the workflow of a merge.

Please guys... you only add more work for the moderators.

FWIW, in my experience for simple configuration files, merging .pacnew's is easiest with a usual "diff -u a.conf a.conf.pacnew | vim -". It gives you a nice colored diff similar to what you get from git or mercurial. On the other hand, for large updates, e.g. samba 3.x -> samba 4.x, it is much faster to just recreate your config.

Cheers, L.

-- Leonid Isaev GnuPG key: 0x164B5A6D Fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE 775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D

You can use `git diff` on files not part of a git repository with `--no-index`. If you're already going to be using `vim`, you might as well be using `vimdiff` for a nicer representation of the deltas along with it updating as you merge. There are even keybindings to merge hunks automatically.

[2013-07-30 18:41:00 -0400] Leonid Isaev:

Please guys... you only add more work for the moderators.

Thanks for caring. They were whitelisted, but not anymore. It's the prisoner's dilemma: when a discussion goes nowhere, the clever choice is to stop replying. Replying anyhow might get you the last word (which may seem important to people not used to discussing by email) but if more than one person replies then it's the worst for everyone... -- Gaetan

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 3:54 PM, P. A. wrote:

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On Tue, 2013-07-30 at 20:05 +0200, Lukas Jirkovsky wrote:

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On 30 July 2013 16:33, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:

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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" ...

...

The only diff tool comparable to vimdiff that comes into my mind is emacs diff mode. You are correct, but both vimdiff and emacs diff mode are sophisticated crutches. They're not "crutches", they offer an elegant presentation of the differences between the files, and you can merge the changes one-by-one without losing context. It only takes a few minutes to learn, and you'll be happy you did.

...

You should learn the basic tools to be able to understand the sophisticated ones later and make good use of them. That's absolutely untrue, there's no secret knowledge you'll gain from torturing yourself with an awful tool. It's only useful for generating patches, not merging files. I agree when I was starting out as a Jr. sys admin, I had only been use to using nano. My new boss kept giving me so much crap for using it and not vim that I finally broke down using it. I uninstalled nano and forced myself, within a day I was flying through the basics on vim. I

On 07/30/2013 01:09 PM, Daniel Micay wrote: think if the person can not play with it for a day or less and get the basics behind it especially vimdiff might not be the best person to trust when you are gone, but that is my personal opinion. Once I got use to vim I kept telling myself, why did I not start with it sooner.