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?
Always read them and decide what to do. However, what to do usually isn't too remove or replace them, but to update them with the changes instead. Most text editors have a way of looking at a diff of two files. This will highlight the differences and you can decide based on the individual changes (maybe it's something you purposefully changed, maybe it's a change to the default). If you use
vim
,vimdiff
will do this.After you make your decisions on what to do, delete the
pacnew
, otherwise you'll keep getting messages about it. They don't get updated all that often (exceptmirrorlist
, I usually just delete that and runreflector
every once in a while).I'll do it, thanks!