MergeMaster
Mentor: someone familiar with dpkg, hopefully
Summary: Port FreeBSD's mergemaster to Debian
Required skills: Perl, C, and/or shellscripting
Description: FreeBSD has a shellscript called "mergemaster" which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian's approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great.
On a related note, some work on this is already in progress on the dpkg team's proposal page:?Teams/Dpkg/Proposals/ConffileDatabase