[H-GEN] CVS for /etc management

[ben.carlyle at invensys.com]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net>
Sent by: Majordomo <majordom at caliburn.humbug.org.au>
10/02/03 18:07
Please respond to general

 
        To:     general at lists.humbug.org.au
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        Subject:        Re: [H-GEN] CVS for /etc management

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,

Greg replied:
> If you need to ask, you don't want to mix CVS and your /etc
> directory -- learn about it by practising on something much less
> important to the health of your system and then, if you're wise,
> decide to forget CVS altogether[1].

I'd be siding with Greg on this one. If you need to ask how to do it, then 
you'd better be doing it on a machine which can easily be recreated after 
you mess it up ;) Perhaps a more constructive comment would be "RCS is 
simpler, and might be more appropriate for a system-critical area such as 
/etc". I'm not a CVS user either, but I suspect that cvs will want to keep 
some files in /etc... and the kind of bootstrapping involved with that 
recovery operation gives me cause to shudder a little. You'd better know 
what you're doing to make that happen. RCS, on the other hand, is very 
simple and more likely to be availble on a rescue disk[1]. It handles one 
file at a time, and doesn't try to do anything complicated[2]. RCS is also 
the mechanism which CVS uses to get things done... so while CVS is 
value-added for tasks involving collections of files with complicated 
relationships RCS is a reliable version management system for a single 
file, or a set of files with limited relationships.

Be warned, also, that if you're using any kind of standard linux[3] or 
non-linux distribution you can expect it not to care too much about your 
change tracking. You may wish to keep the tracking to files you know that 
no package is going to touch, rather than try to consume the whole 
directory tree with your way of doing things.

That said, no doubt plenty of people have done this, and no doubt many 
succeded. If you still want to proceed you may even find people on this 
list that do or have done it. Just remember that until you've done it 
successfully a few times it's more likely to decrease your realiability 
than increase it.

Benjamin.
[1] Actually, it probably won't be on there, but it's smaller than CVS and 
being a single program it's easier to get full installation on said rescue 
disk :) You may wish to roll your own with the facility available.
[2] Simplicity and reliability are good bedfellows.



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