[csw-maintainers] versioning /etc

[Philip Brown]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 01:45:54PM -0400, Ben Walton wrote:
> 
> Hi Phil and Peter,
> 
> I wondered what both you think about supporting a tool like
> etckeeper[1] from pkg-get and pkgutil.  With the recent discussion
> about defaulting to /etc/opt/csw for our stuff, I'm considering
> packaging it up.
> 
> The tools would need to grow the idea of pre- and post- install hooks,
> so that etckeeper could be driven to snapshot /etc before and after
> packages are manipulated with the high-level tools.  These hooks may
> be useful for other things too...it seems that apt, yum and co support
> a generic hook mechanism for things like this to plug in to.

I think that sounds rather overly broad.

Not to mention, it sorta assumes that

"you run an install tool, and you DONT KNOW WHAT IT DOES, so you 
 use this tool to make a copy of everything".

If one of our packages falls in the category of 
 "we dont know what it does in etc",
it's a bad package, and needs to be fixed!!

If you want to package up etckeeper... great! That being said...

As far as integrating it in our install tools, however, I dont think it's a
good idea.

It's extra complication, and it encourages sloppy package creation.