hawking's weblog

versioning /etc with subversion

Although portage takes care of configuration files very well, no system can have enough protection from human errors. Versioning configuration files under /etc is a nice solution to this. If you do a mistake and delete some file or any other silliness that might happen , you just revert to a former revision and solve the problem.

This can be achieved very easily:

1. First create a svn repository

   svnadmin create /root/svn
   

2. Then import /etc to the repository

   svn import /etc file:///root/svn -m 'Initial import'
   

3. Checkout the project

   rm -rf /etc
   svn ci file:///root/svn/etc
           
   

Now change some configuration files and do 'svn status' When you change your configuration files you can commit them to the repository:

cd /etc
svn ci -m 'Changed MAKEOPTS=j2 in /etc/make.conf'