cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/198018

Hello! EOS user here. I upgrade my system with topgrade, and sometimes it tells me about some pacnew files, asking if merging, replacing or removing the original ones. I snapshotted my system and tried replacing my original files (an eos-something file, where the new file changed a bunch of mirrors, and /etc/shells, where it replaced sh and bash with git-shell and zsh. After the reboot, I was unable to boot into my user account (“wrong password” but it was the correct password). I had to boot as root and restore the snapshot. I then removed that evil pacnew file.

Now my question is, how should I deal with these pacnew files? should I always remove them, always replace them, always read them and decide? I’d rather not read these things everyday, it’s a bit boring, so I hope there’s a better solution. How do you deal with these?

  • nous@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    pacnew files are created when the package has changed it, but so have you. So you would replace it only if you don’t care about the changes you have locally. Otherwise you likely want to diff them and manually merge in any new changes to the config. Generally speaking most should not make your system unbootable, but I would look more closely at any core system files and see what the changes are rather then just blindly accepting them. Even if you do that for less critical packages.