When updating Portage on a Gentoo system you generally have to update all the config files after wards. The default way to do this is to use etc-update. There is however a better way and that is to use dispatch-conf. One of the reasons I prefer it is that it makes a backup of the file you have replaced so that if something does break you can replace the original file. This is something that etc-update doesn’t do.
I am not going to go into a long drawn out explanation of dispatch-config because there is a excellent page on its usage here There is one annoying thingt about dispatch-config though and that is when it shows you the differences between the two files its all the same color. This makes it very hard to ascertain which file is which. As you can see its rather difficult to figure out whats going on. Well thats where colordiff can help out.
hellsgate ~ # nano /etc/dispatch-conf.conf
And find this line: diff=”diff -Nu ‘%s’ ‘%s’ | less –no-init –QUIT-AT-EOF”
And then make it look like this: diff=”colordiff -Nu ‘%s’ ‘%s’ | less –no-init –QUIT-AT-EOF”
Now when we use the dispatch-config command on the same file as before we get a nice red and blue text to tell us which file is which. In this example the red text is the original file and the blue text is the differences with the new file.
