Get with Cymor and interrogate him about what Debian does exactly. When I do an upgrade, if a package has a config file and the author has added new default features, the apt/dpkg system compares it to your config file to see if you have customized it yet. I've been told the best thing to do is to say no to an update of the config file to preserve your changes. I have chosen on one box to look at the changes, but got a bit lost. I assume that once you are familiar w/ a given pkg, you could change this stuff on the fly to get new features.
Brian Kelsay
Gerald Combs <> 03/23/05 11:00PM >>>
Dave Hull wrote:
There are system administrators who use version control for config files. It's not just for breakfast anymore.
Out of curiosity, are there any distros that version-control configuration files out of the box?
Brian Kelsay wrote:
Get with Cymor and interrogate him about what Debian does exactly. When I do an upgrade, if a package has a config file and the author has added new default features, the apt/dpkg system compares it to your config file to see if you have customized it yet. I've been told the best thing to do is to say no to an update of the config file to preserve your changes. I have chosen on one box to look at the changes, but got a bit lost. I assume that once you are familiar w/ a given pkg, you could change this stuff on the fly to get new features.
Gentoo does this too, in its own annoying way. What I want is something that will automatically detect when I make a change to a given file in /etc, and check that change into SVN. That way I can see all the changes that have been made to a configuation file, and revert back to a specific revision if needed.
Debian packages occasionally update their config files, along with the binaries and documentation. This is typically annoying, because the changes are most often commented lines. I've never seen a program dramatically change its conf file structure to warrant keeping the new changes, but sometimes they do add new variables and default settings for them. Debian gives you the option to view the diff in any case, and if you aren't certain, its almost always advisable to keep the current config file. If I remember correctly, apt/dpkg is not intelligent enough to merge the two, so your choices are typically take the new comments or keep your customizations. AFAIK, there is no CVS repository for these changes, and it appears to me that apt-get would ignore the repository if you started one. I suppose its possible to design a policy around this, such as committing nightly, however.
Justin Dugger
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 07:57:04 -0600, Brian Kelsay [email protected] wrote:
Get with Cymor and interrogate him about what Debian does exactly. When I do an upgrade, if a package has a config file and the author has added new default features, the apt/dpkg system compares it to your config file to see if you have customized it yet. I've been told the best thing to do is to say no to an update of the config file to preserve your changes. I have chosen on one box to look at the changes, but got a bit lost. I assume that once you are familiar w/ a given pkg, you could change this stuff on the fly to get new features.
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Brian Kelsay -
Gerald Combs -
Justin Dugger