this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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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?

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[โ€“] blaise@champserver.net 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Install pacman-contrib, this gives you access to pacdiff which goes through all your pacnew files allowing you to see diffs of the changes and giving you different options to deal with them.

Ah! I wondered where that (contrib) had gone.

Thank-you!