[H-GEN] CVS for /etc management

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> David Findlay wrote:
> | I want to use CVS to manage my /etc files on my server. Can one point me to a
> | HOWTO on this, or some tips on what to do and what not to do? Thanks,
> If you need to ask, you don't want to mix CVS and your /etc
> directory --

I'd have to agree with this advice.

I looked into doing just this a few years ago and discovered that CVS
isn't very good about preserving file permissions and ownerships on
checked-out files; you could probably hack around it with some of the
pre-checkin and post-checkin scripts that can be run, but then *again*
you'd have to run CVS as root to be able to write in /etc, which I
certainly would not recommend.

Also, since reinstalling I've been careful to use RCS to handle the
configuration management of my /etc files and it's worked pretty
well.  Occasionally I'll forget to check in some new configuration
file before I start editing, that sort of thing, but on the whole it
works well enough, and most files in /etc don't ever need to be
touched, anyway.

> learn about it by practising on something much less important to the
> health of your system and then,

Indeed.  I'll never forget when I was testing out rsync by copying
/etc about; I rm'ed the wrong tree and ended up with a copy of /etc in
/tmp, or something, and nothing else.

It was *very* distressing because all the files I needed to move back
were right there, but without an /etc/passwd it became utterly
impossible to do anything (without a boot disk, rah rah rah, which was
a difficult proposition on that system).
-- 
``I may have agreed to something involving a goat.''  -- CJ

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