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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 28 May 2003 03:51 am, Michael.James@csiro.au wrote:
Much as I love Suse there is the buisness of OS upgrades.
Upgrading tends to leave cruft so I always do clean installs. At a minimum, I preserve a seperate /home partition with a copy of the old /etc/directory in it.
Once build then comes the nightmare of re-implementing all the config changes that defined that machine.
What I want to do is put the whole /etc/ directory under CVS. (A cron job would take nightly snapshots and capture any un-comitted changes.)
That way the upgrade aftermath nightmare becomes a systematic CVS merge operation, bringing the old /etc branch back onto the new install. Then CVS will hold the differences from a stock Suse install for system recovery.
Useful also when there are multiple sysadmins, (or one absent-minded one).
Anyone played with something like this? How would CVS cope with the web of links in /etc/init.d?
I have thought about this myself in the past. Here are a couple of thoughts: - - cvs does not handle symlinks. They are generated by insserv and contain no content so there's no need to keep them under revision control - - You can't remove directories in cvs without modifying the repository directly - - You should only control files that you have changed. Stuff like /etc/sysconfig/* and /etc/mail/*. What I would do is check against the RPM database with rpm -V. If the MD5sum changed, the file should be controlled. If not, then you are using defaults - - Use subversion instead of cvs. It's probably better suited to this kind of thing because you can remove directories and it versions the entire repository instead of individual files All of that said, I find myself using the YaST2 backup because it only backs up changed or new files. That way I don't use so much space and I get stuff I forget about. - -- James Oakley Engineering - SolutionInc Ltd. joakley@solutioninc.com http://www.solutioninc.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+1K/k+FOexA3koIgRAjBfAKCZE5ejKDbN+LI/sAT1nh6xXVcs/wCfd4s8 Mp+ILXHj5dWgdWXuKRmWYt8= =yRUf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----