first off some background info - i have been using freebsd since version 3 for many types of headless servers (both personally and professionally) and have literally built hundreds of systems - all command line, never gui. now being retired i wanted to run a freebsd desktop system for the first time on a discarded laptop. no trouble at all installing freebsd 12.1 on the laptop. having never dealt with xorg, that part didn't go very well. so i looked for a desktop "distro" and ghostbsd xfce seemed to be my best option. installation from the iso went smoothly. first order of business was to set up my normal new install basics - editing dot files and config files. second order of business was to process system updates. update mgr was problematic so i just dropped to standard pkg commands, then allowed update mgr to finish the process.

now for my first of many questions. it seems that the ghostbsd 20.04.1 updates clobbered all of my root dot file edits and replaced with a version dated 7-14-20. looking further in /etc/ and /usr/local/etc many files also have that same date which leads me to believe that they were also changed. is this behavior that i need to expect going forward? if so, what are the specific packages that cause that so they can be locked in the future.

Config in /etc/ and /usr/local/etc/ might get merge with the new pkg can merge it will, if pkg can't it will create file like this .pkgnew. If a file gets override, we need to know to make sure it will not happen again. Locking the packages is not the best way, because the OS update will miss the new config file.

Has for the root user, GhostBSD is not made to be run as the root user. We don't recommend it.

As I said, if there are files with users config that get override, we need to know about them. If the user config is still in the config file but got a changes in it, it is normal behaviour. GhostBSD is not like FreeBSD we do OS update true packages.

many times i will be working shell sessions on multiple systems in different networks at the same time, so it is critical for me to have my prompts display the network indicator, hostname, current working directory, command number, and privilege level in a standardized format across all systems that i manage. this is the second thing done on every box, the first is to create an /etc/vi.exrc file to set up my editor.

when the prompt reverted back to its default after the updates, that is how i noticed the overwrite.

update merges would be what i would have expected. changes to /etc/csh.logout and /etc/rc.conf were not overwritten even though the timestamp did change to 7-14-20

am i correct to assume that these updates bring my version from 20.04.1 to 20.08.04? where in the system does it show my current version?