Linux Distros with CVS/RCS for Config Files? 36
bergeron76 asks: "Does anyone know of a Linux distributions or modifications to a Linux d system that implement a CVS[like] structure for control over system configuration files (/etc, /usr/etc, and so on)? Personally, I'd love to see a distro that featured a native CVS/RCS control mechanism for editing system configuration files. Does anything like this currently exist? If not, is anyone working in this direction?"
Just do it (Score:1)
Do it yourself (Score:1)
Gentoo does this. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Gentoo does this. (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:5, Informative)
That's actually a really good idea, too, I'm not sure why I never thought of it myself...
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:5, Informative)
I beg to differ... I had an issue just last week where I tried checking
Now, I'm not sure if this is purely a Gentoo issue or not (I'm not terribly familiar with devfs), but it's something to remember. Back up
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:3, Informative)
It really messed me up for a couple days though, I'll tell ya that.
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:2)
- it was determined that the same thing could be done in userspace
- devfs had been shoved into the tree in hope that its quality will catch up
- devfs was found to have fixable and unfixable bugs
- the former had stayed around for many months with maintainer claiming that everything works fine
- the latter had stayed, period.
- the devfs maintainer/author disappeared and stoped maintaining the code.
Gentoo devfsd malfunction (Score:1)
Actually, something similar could conceivably go wrong with
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:3, Insightful)
The '.d' on the directory name tells you not to put random extra files in there. Apart from those directories, you can follow the rule that extra files won't break anything.
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:2)
Re:Nothing is stopping you from doing this. (Score:2)
works for my user accounts (Score:5, Interesting)
I just add 'svn up' to my login script and 'svn ci --message "%HOST%@%TIME%%DATE%"' to my logout script.
No reason it shouldn't work for a whole system with an initial 'svn up' somewhere in rc.local and periodic updates in a chron job. Just do a commit whenever you change things on your template system and 5 minutes later it'll be on all your boxen.
There was a slashdot article about putting a home directory under version control a few months ago from which I got the idea, too lazy to find the link at the moment though.
Re:works for my user accounts (Score:2)
Thanks, that was the one.
Yikes! (Score:2)
Funny, when I first read that, I thought it said Rebversion...
And I thought "Yikes! So that's what happened to the Goatse guy."
BitKeeper (Score:2)
Most distros have CVS installed, right? (Score:1)
[user@localhost]# su
password:
[root@localhost]# cd
[root@localhost]# cvs import . -m 'my linux distro' mydistro username start
Re:Most distros have CVS installed, right? (Score:1)
Re:Most distros have CVS installed, right? (Score:2)
I once had a nightmarish situation emerge with a bunch of symlinked X11 dirs and CVS-ing my
Still, for many users, just using CVS, as-is, should be sufficient.
Another alternative is to backup directories like
Re:Most distros have CVS installed, right? (Score:1)
It might also be a good alternative to CVS as you can just diff between full directory trees to determine the changed files. (or read the logs).
Yes, Gentoo... (Score:2, Informative)
An old idea for modern times... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or am I just being impatient? Will Reiser4 provide this capability?
Re:An old idea for modern times... (Score:2, Interesting)
But with running low on disk space all the time (those were the days when a hard disc had 5MB = five MegaBytes total capacity) , frequent use of the PURGE command erased all old copies quite often too early...
FreeBSD (Score:2, Interesting)
You can choose to overwrite your file, keep your file or merge the two together. I like to think of it as the ultimate choice in system housekeeping.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:2)
System Restore (Score:2)
changetrack (Score:1)
changetrack uses RCS as it's backend, not CVS (support for CVS is on the Todo list), but the end result is the same. It is specifically intended for tracking system files like those in
dispatch-conf (Score:1)
RCS and vim (Score:1)
At work, we have a simple wrapper for vim that does all of the RCS stuff for us, like checking in and checking out files. We use it on all of our production servers, as it gives use nice revision control over our files.
cfengine (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.cfengine.org/