Hi Martin,

Martin Steigerwald writes:

> Olaf Meeuwissen via Dng - 13.12.20, 03:48:23 CET:
>> Hi Hendrik,
>>
>> Hendrik Boom writes:
>> > I wish everything user-configurable under /etc was under revision
>> > control. then we might even be able to have a vendor branch and a
>> > local branch.
>> Have a look at etckeeper.
>>
>> I've been using that for several years now on a variety of machines.
>> The log for the machine I'm writing this on goes back all the way to
>> its initial install on 2017-01-11 of Devuan's Jessie Official Beta2
>> :-)
>>
>> You may want to keep your sensitive /etc/ files out of the repository
>> though, depending on your level of paranoia.
>
> I still do not use etckeeper, cause I prefer to just add the files to the
> repository that I actually change. This way, whenever I like to
> replicate the config onto another machine or even just look at what I
> changed, I can just clone the repository and have exactly a tree of
> those files that I adapted.

Actually, I have been *thinking* about using vcsh to track those parts
of /etc/ that I tinker with myself and that are amenable to sharing
between (subsets of) my machines. I've been using vcsh to selectively
manage the dot-files I care about and a small collection of snippets and
scripts and that works quite well, for me at least. Still need to roll
up my sleeves and see if I can get something like that to work for /etc/
or even / (so I can track /usr/local/ bits too).

> Of course, Ansible would be also an
> alternative. I am just not completely sure whether it makes sense with
> just a few machines. I may start to use it with hosted virtual machines
> as it eases moving to a different provider if need be.
>
> I do not care about all the automatic changes by package upgrades.

That's you ;-) I do care, so I use etckeeper.
Hendrik asked about stuffing /etc/ in git, so I suggested etckeeper.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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