[rancid] Re: The annoyance of whitespace changes.

[Will Miller]

Miller, William S. wrote:
> Hey guys, I'm a newcomer, so be gentle.
> 
> I've looked high and low for a solution to this, but to no avail-- hence
> my adding to your inboxes.
> 
> So, here's my problem.  I have a device (specifically a firewall
> services module in a 6509) being monitored by rancid.  Much to
> frequently, though (on the order of a few times a day), I get config
> diffs mailed to me that contain a bunch of changes like this:
> 
> @@ -500,9 +500,9 @@
>     port-object eq 27002
>     port-object eq 27003
>     port-object eq 27004
>     port-object eq 27005
> - port-object eq 27006
> +  port-object eq 27006
>     port-object eq 27007
>     port-object eq 27008
>     port-object eq 27009
>     port-object eq 27010
> 
> Note that the only thing that changed is the whitespace before the
> command.
> 
> Try as I might, I can't figure out a workaround.  I tried modifying
> control_rancid from "cvs -f diff -U 4" to "cvs -f diff -w -U 4".  This,
> however, didn't change the number of emails coming in.  It still printed
> the header with no diffs listed:
> 
> Index: configs/<IP>
> ===================================================================
> retrieving revision 1.240
> diff -w -U4 -r1.240 <IP>
> 
> (Yeah, that was revision 240... no, we don't change the config quite
> that often.)
> 
> So, any of you have any ideas why this might be happening or, failing
> that, how I might work around it?
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> 
> --
> Will

Old topic, I know, but here's how I worked around it.  I took Lance's 
suggestion and just pulled out leading whitespace from all configs. 
Diff between the original and modified versions of control_rancid:

361c361,363
<       mv $router.new $router
---
 >       #mv $router.new $router
 > cat $router.new | sed -e 's/^ *//g' > $router
 > rm -f $router.new

Admittedly not the most elegant solution--and not even implemented very 
well, but it does what I wanted which is to mute all the false differences.

It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure I tried Aaron's suggestion about 
killing the pager, but either I didn't do it right or it didn't do what 
was wanted, so I went this route.

-- 
Will