Please remove $Id$ from config files

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon Feb 18 21:32:01 UTC 2019


Grant Taylor <gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net> writes:

> This seems to be like it's not a problem / bug with INN.  Or rather it
> seems like an issue with how the Debian package is handling what comes
> from the INN source code.

> As such, I'd think that taking this up with the Debian package
> maintainer would be a better place to start.

It's fallout from a fairly reasonable approach Debian takes with
configuration files, and doing something better (three-way merges, like
ucf does) also carries a rather high complexity cost.

Are the $Id$ strings in configuration files useful to anyone?

The version control world has generally moved on from VCS markers like
$Id$, in part because Git doesn't support them without pretty awful hacks,
they make three-way merges excessively complicated, and there are
reasonable philosophical objections to either modifying files during the
commit process or, as Subversion does, having one's checked-out files be
different than the contents of the repository.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.


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