With every upgrade I struggle with a "changed to default" login welcome message and have to do my modifications again.

 

Therefore I would like to explain my changes and hope you can integrate them in the default version...:

 

Your welcome message prints the $BOARD_NAME as ASCII art. Probably you have dozens of boards and can distinguish them in this way. So after login-in you directly see which board it is.

 

I have only one type of "boards" (Cubietruck) and distinguish them by their hostname. So I have to replace "$BOARD_NAME"  with "$(hostname -s)"  in /etc/update-motd.d/10-header to identify my boards.

 

What do you think about a change in that direction?

I think about adding a config file that would allow disabling certain MOTD components (header, sysinfo, updates), and you could add your own file to /etc/update-motd.d/ that won't be affected by updates.