[oe] Upgrading files identified as CONFFILES?

[Paul Barker]

On 6 November 2014 14:06, Bryan Evenson <bevenson at melinkcorp.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> First, please let me know if I should be directing this to a different OE/yocto mailing list; I have a hard time figuring out which list is appropriate at times.
>
> I am on poky/dylan and am using NTP on my target system.  I would like to change the configuration for NTP and push out the changes to devices that are firmware upgradable.  I made the change and pushed out the upgrade, but I see that ntp.conf did not get changed on at least one of the systems (the first one I checked).  Now I see that ntp.conf is listed under CONFFILES in the main ntp recipe (http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/1.7/mega-manual/mega-manual.html#var-CONFFILES), which explains why it was not upgraded.
>
> First, I want to confirm how the CONFFILES parameter works.  If a file is listed under CONFFILES, is that file never modified during an upgrade or is it only upgraded if it has not been modified (matches the default file from the previous package version)?  I am using opkg for package management if that makes a difference.
>
> Second, how do I force the NTP configuration to be upgraded?  For my system, the user has no interface to modify the NTP configuration.  So even though it is a configuration file, in my case I want ntp.conf to always match the version provided by the upgraded package.
>
> Thanks,
> Bryan
>

This largely depends on the package manager. I can tell you how opkg
works... If a file is listed in CONFFILES it is backed up before an
update is applied. By default, if a conffile has changed, the new
changes go into a file named "%s-opkg" where %s is the original file
name. If "--force-maintainer" is passed as an argument or the option
"force_maintainer" is set, the new changes overwrite the version in
the file system. In opkg v0.3.0 there will be a new
"--ignore-maintainer" argument and "ignore_maintainer" option to keep
the conffile unmodified but not store the changes in "%s-opkg".

Hope that helps,

-- 
Paul Barker

Email: paul at paulbarker.me.uk
http://www.paulbarker.me.uk