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White Paper: Intelligent Updates to Configuration Files

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate various technologies and approaches used for change management of configuration files on a system. It is a common practice to change configuration files to suite the requirement of a particular system. Thus, the configuration files are often changed after installation by either the user or postinstallation scripts. If an update to the system includes a newer version of a changed configuration file, the update mechanism needs to take into account two sets of changes.

Update Tools shipped with most Operating Systems or distributions today make no attempt to merge these two sets of changes. They either save the new or the old configuration file under a different name or overwrite user changes completely. Both of these behaviors are not ideal. The application or the service will not function correctly unless these sets of changes are merged.

In this paper, we provide a new twofold solution – automated merging of changes that are done by a software provider after installation and manual merging of changes performed by the user thereafter. While some manual intervention is required in this approach, it is a more reliable solution. This approach also includes a tool to ease the manual file comparison and merge process.

Download the White Paper: Intelligent Updates to Configuration Files (pdf)