[csw-maintainers] versioning /etc

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Philip Brown's message of Mon Jun 15 13:55:11 -0400 2009:
> 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".

No, it's not to mitigate this at all...

> 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!!

Agreed, but again, that's not the purpose of this tool.

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

You wouldn't be integrating it _specifically_, but rather providing a
framework for other things to be transparently integrated, thus
allowing a site to leverage this tool or others that may find running
code pre and post package actions to be useful.  etckeeper would
simply leverage these hooks.  Nobody would be forced to use it, as
absence of the package (and thus the hooks it would install) would see
pkg-get/pkgutil operate as it had historically.

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

Nope.  The point of etckeeper is to version /etc...it's not to
mitigate sloppy packaging.  I think it's fairly common to version
parts of /etc these days, whether you use some vcs or cp -p.  This
wraps it up into a nice package and allows for a single repo for all
of /etc instead of one for apache, one for foo, one for...The beauty
of this is that it can help in cases where a new version of a package
breaks your existing install by trampling a config file (incompatible
changes, etc)...or if you want to see exactly what it changed.  It
goes beyond CSW packages, to everything that lives in /etc.

Again, as I mentioned, I'm not totally sold on this particular package
myself, but the idea of pkg-get/pkgutil providing hooks for other
things can be completely independent of this...

-Ben
-- 
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302

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