/etc in CVS

[John Baldwin]

On Friday 23 April 2010 2:50:15 am Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 04:41:27PM +0200 I heard the voice of
> Ulrich Spörlein, and lo! it spake thus:
> > 
> > I have a .hg directory sitting in / for every machine I usually take
> > care of. hgignore is of course set to *, so only explicitly added files
> > are tracked.
> 
> I do pretty much the same thing (except mine has .bzr/ and .bzrignore
> ;).  Using the VCS to handle updates requires something a bit broader
> though.  I HAVE considered it.  You'd need to do the sort of 'make
> install' stuff mergemaster does to a tempdir, and make a branch there
> checking in the snapshots, and have your etc be a derived branch from
> that.  That way you have all the VCS merge capabilities to do the
> merges and track where they came from.
> 
> Mergemaster works well enough that I've given no serious thought
> beyond idle "that would be cool" thinking on the matter though   8-}

etcupdate essentially seeks to do a simplified version of the vendor imports 
by just keeping the last two imports around so that each new import can be 
applied.  This does mean it is more limited than a full source code control 
solution, but it also ends up being more lightweight.

-- 
John Baldwin