[Sysadmin] svn, cvs, rcs

[Adrian Simmons]

On 17 Nov 2008, at 03:42, Dean Mah wrote:

> Are we putting all the configuration files under revision control?  If
> so, which system?
Well, I'd heard about this but never actually done it, looking a  
little deeper it seems there are a few issues on a multi-admin system :)

With SVN there's also the issue of .svn sitting in *every single  
directory*, something that would annoy me, and I suspect everyone else.

SVK has the advantage of clean working copies. There's an entry on the  
svk wiki that covers some of the issues - if you're interested scroll  
down to the bottom of the page and read "Can multiple admins keep /etc  
under revision control sanely?" here:
http://svk.bestpractical.com/view/SVKFAQ

Lenny/testing has a package called etcinsvk that I'm playing with  
because I like svk, but that's not even available for etch, so  
irrelevant.

Almost every VCS has it's own package/script to deal with this, eg  
etckeeper is based on git/hg or bzr. See the 'similar packages' list  
at http://packages.debian.org/lenny/etcinsvk etc *is* available for  
etch via backports.

Basically doing this with raw SVN (or any other VCS) on a multi-admin  
system is a non starter. Anyone have any experience of tools for this?

I'm thinking just go with Dean's suggestion of Tripwire for now, and  
forget about config files in VCS?

Adrian
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