[Sysadmin] svn, cvs, rcs

[Dean Mah]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Adrian Simmons <adrian at perlucida.com> wrote:
>
> 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

Usually I use RCS to handle config files.  No concurrent checkout, no
remote checkout supported.  Just add your username to your commit log.