cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/198018

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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[–] 11 points 2 years ago

Now my question is, how should I deal with these pacnew files?

Install pacman-contrib which includes pacdiff. Meld is easy for beginners.

DIFFPROG="meld" pacdiff --sudo

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacnew_files#Managing_.pac*_files for more options.

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