[clug] Subversion for sysadmin tasks

[Robert Edwards]

I looked into doing this as well. I am not sure that subversion is the
right way to do it for /etc, main issues I identified are:
  - ownership of files (when you extract from the repository, they all
	belong to you, but not all files in /etc are owned by root)
  - preserving permissions on the files
  - all those .svn directories lying around (and some of them are quite
	large).

Still, I haven't come up with a better way yet (so I don't use anything
at all... )

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.

Steve Granger wrote:
> 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.