A case for hg on /etc
All of a sudden, I find myself editing lots of config files on systems on
systems maintained by lots of other people. Most of the time, a
text editor is all what you need but there are times when is doesn't
cut. When I become a living implementation of bin/patch,
I seriously consider putting /etc under a revision
control system.
Why is it good to have /etc under a revision control
system? We often have to perform a change on related but not quite
similar servers. Furthermore, it happens that the solution is not
straight forward to come up to. If we know that it's doing to
require a lot of tweaking, we can always backup the original file
and generate a diff once we have it working. This
sucks for many reasons: it won't take into accounts changes
involving multiple files, it's hard to merge into a single operation
multiple edits, and you end up with way too many backups:
foo.cfg,
foo.cfg.bak,
foo.cfg.old,
foo.cfg.old1,
foo.cfg.2007-11-18, and
foo.cfg.051211. Yuck!