[oe] Upgrading files identified as CONFFILES?

[Bryan Evenson]

Paul,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org
> [mailto:openembedded-devel-bounces at lists.openembedded.org] On
> Behalf Of Paul Barker
> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2014 9:36 AM
> To: OE Devel
> Subject: Re: [oe] Upgrading files identified as CONFFILES?
> 
> 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,
> 

Thanks for the detailed explanation.  And just to explore my options, if I were to add the following in my ntp bbappend:

CONFFILES_${PN} = ""

would that remove ntp.conf from the CONFFILES list and force the configuration to be updated each time it changes?

Thanks,
Bryan