[clug] Subversion for sysadmin tasks

Steve Granger steveg at magellan-technology.com
Mon Jul 31 05:44:42 GMT 2006


Hi,

I'm looking to get an idea of some of the best practices that people
follow for using subversion (or CVS... or even RCS) for assisting
systems maintenance. I'm looking to maintain files in /etc to start off
with.

My main problem is with still allowing package management tools to
manage files in /etc, with the working copy being the actually files
which doesn't seem like the best situation with all or the .svn
directories hanging around. Also in the scenario where a bunch  of files
are removed from /etc it seems painful to have to remove each single one
by one. Yes it's easy with a script to extract the list from svn status
output, I was just wondering it there was a more subversion way to do
it, like svn add * just ignores files which already exist in the repository.

I'm not overly familiar with version control systems that I've created a
repository

svnadmin create /var/svn

on my machine seashore and imported /etc

svn import /etc file:///var/svn/seashore/etc

to try things out.

Eventually I envisage putting this on another machine to have it as a
type of secondary backup.


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