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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

That is one incredibly annoying web site.

[edit - it stops after a while]

Regarding: "The etc sets are now gone. All the sample /etc files are now included in the base set. This should make sysmerge must [sic] easier and faster in the future, since there will be many fewer conflicts to resolve. On the other hand, even rc and rc.conf are now overwritten, so it’s not possible to maintain local mods without additional work. This makes sense, though, since /etc/rc is as much a part of the base system as /sbin/init. You don’t want to be running a five year old edition."

I thought (and the manpages always indicated) that the rule was that /etc/rc and /etc/rc.conf were fair game, and that if you wanted to make changes that weren't overwritten by a system upgrade, to put them in /etc/rc.local and /etc/rc.conf.local. I'm unclear why this is considered a problem.

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I'm thinking that might be an April Fools design. I've been to his site before and never got the giant animated text-blocking overlays.

It is, I read flak as often as Ted publishes something new and I never saw that. Couple that with the fact that Ted loves to rant[1][2] about bad UI design, especially on the web, and it becomes obvious that his latest "feature" will be gone tomorrow.

1 http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/the-wiki-box-is-out-of-c...

2 http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/no-im-not-running-git

Just when you think you're safe,

"Check me out with CVS!"

I interpreted it as "illustrating absurdity by being absurd."

> I thought (and the manpages always indicated) that the rule was that /etc/rc and /etc/rc.conf were fair game, and that if you wanted to make changes that weren't overwritten by a system upgrade, to put them in /etc/rc.local and /etc/rc.conf.local. I'm unclear why this is considered a problem.

For the most part that's true, but /etc/rc.local is run fairly late, so if you have a sufficiently-crazy setup you might have to edit /etc/rc.

For example, before softraid crypto was integrated into the bootloader I modified /etc/rc to prompt for the keyphrase before it tried to mount the disks.

Understood - but, at least you have been forewarned by the man pages, that any changes you've made to /etc/rc are going to have to be carried forward, because after an upgrade, /etc/rc will be wiped and set to the operating system version.

I'm a basic novice when it comes to OpenBSD (But a huge fan), and that, in addition to discovering that you keep all the old versions of every library ever installed when upgrading, where two things that I had been taught - so I presume that the knowledge was universal.

Base libraries are not removed automatically but libraries from packages are (though sometimes they stay in limbo as .libs- package, e.g. if pkg_add is interrupted).

> [edit - it stops after a while]

It stopped for me after I closed the window in disgust.

Internet Jackass Day is bad enough on a fundamental level, but when your jackass behaviour gets in the way of people's actual tasks (and there's no way to say 'stop this BS'), you're not being funny.

It's an April Fools website. That means it, and all of its content, is wrong.

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