Am Dienstag, 10. April 2007 16:50:00 schrieb Roman Kyrylych:
Few hours ago I did an update on my server via ssh. First I updated pacman from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1, then did -Su. One of packages was filesystem-0.8-2. I don't have etc/fstab in NoUpgrade since 2.9.8. Then some idiot rebooted server before I checked .pacnew files etc. One of my coworker called my by cellphone (I also noticed PuTTY became inactive). When I get to my second job (where server is located) - I saw that /etc/fstab is rewritten with package's default, though pacman also created fstab.pacnew. Any ideas why did this happen?
Well, it`s not the first time that this happens. In most cases this is the fault of the package and not pacman itself. But anyway: pacman should never overwrite anything within /etc. We should replace the backup=... tag in the PKGBUILD with an option like overwrite=... which explicitly lists every file that has to be overwritten. In every other case pacman has to ask the user if a file in /etc should be overwritten. Of cause we have to check if there is a difference between the current and new file. As a workaround I have setup a cron job which backs up my /etc directory every day.