Bug 960986

Summary: Manual merging of configuration changes from 6.0 to 6.1
Product: [JBoss] JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 Reporter: Brenton Leanhardt <bleanhar>
Component: DocumentationAssignee: eap-docs <eap-docs>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 6.1.0CC: ccopello, eap-docs, fnasser, sjay
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2018-12-19 14:15:03 UTC Type: Bug
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Brenton Leanhardt 2013-05-08 13:11:39 UTC
Description of problem:
This bug is technically a feature request and possibly a documentation update.

The product documentation we received for upgrading from EAP 6.0 to 6.1 on RHEL contained the following step in "Procedure 4.2. Upgrade to the latest JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 release"

2. Manually merge each created *.rpmnew file that contains changes into the production configuration files. 

As much as possible we would prefer to see EAP be able to merge user settings with product defaults without admins having to intervene.  Many services use the "drop directory" approach to achieve this.

For large deployments (openshift.com for example) it is viewed as an unnecessary burden to deal with manually merging configurations when in reality the new configs could have been trivially merged.

Another approach dealing with this on Linux is to leave that step out from the documentation entirely and test that configurations from 6.0 to 6.1 are backwards compatible.  If in reality the settings are backwards compatible for 6.1 I would _highly_ recommend removing that step from the documentation or at the very least clearly state that it is an optional step.

In our opinion there are better ways to instruct administrators on how to leverage new upstream configuration settings:

1) The platform should easily be able to detect if a recommended setting is missing.  NOTICE or INFO messages could be printed to the logs in most cases.  In rare cases it could even be an ERROR.  This gives administrators guidance on the importance of a new setting.  Few things make admins more angry than manually merging settings they don't even use.

2) On a Linux system where .rpmsave and .rpmnew files are sometimes created it would be easy to have the jbossas service script warn admins about those files (however the service would still start normally).  There are other options here as well.

Comment 4 sgilda 2016-09-14 10:59:07 UTC
This is a 6.x patching bug, so I am reassigning it to the expert.