[TriLUG] Keeping track of system changes

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Mike M wrote:

>On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 03:29:02PM -0400, Rick DeNatale wrote:
>  
>
>>Using CVS to keep version trees of config files seems a little
>>heavyweight to me, is anyone doing anything like this or are there
>>other, better tools for that?
>>    
>>
>
>missed this one; very excellent
>
>  
>
Personally, I prefer and use RCS.  It's super light-weight, really 
straight forward, and I have a nice bash wrapper script around vim which 
takes the tedium out of check in and check out.  Basically, the script 
does everything for you.  It's a little rough around the edges (it 
doesn't handle filenames with spaces in them very elegantly, at the 
moment) but other than that it's perfectly serviceable.  If anyone is 
interested in it I'll clean it up and post it.  I use it on all of the 
machines I administer to retain an RCS history of every file I ever 
change on a box.  The nice advantage being the setup is nil, every box 
I've touched in the past few years already has RCS installed by default, 
and it doesn't require centralized repositories to be setup, maintained, 
etc (which is a blessing and a curse, there is no centrally managed 
place to store files).  RCS is based on flat text files, if you screw 
something up in RCS, even if you can't remember how to fix it the right 
way (with RCS, ci or co) you can always just flip open the RCS ,v file 
itself and fix it.

I haven't been following the CVS thread, it was entirely too busy for my 
day, today.  Sorry if some of these topics have already been covered.

Aaron S. Joyner