Re: Configuration management

[Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf@epkowa.co.jp>]

Hi Jean Pierre,

Thanks for your follow-up.  Looks like you've stumbled across the same
limitations I have.  You probably know that PreservePermissions could
be of some help with permissions, ownerships and symlinks and that it
does not work in a client/server set up :-(

But there's another thing that CVS won't let you do very easily.  For
me that is probably reason enough to drop it.  All the changes I make
in places outside /etc, e.g. adding some symlinks in /var, putting up
some stuff in /usr/local, will not be incorporated.

Right now, I'm looking into a local-config package.  It shouldn't be
too hard to get that going methinks and it gives you the flexibility
to script configuration changes.  That allows you to do or don't do
things based upon which packages are installed and even based on which
machine you are installing if you want to get fancy.  Heck, you could
even force feed certain packages onto a machine through dependencies.
That should make cloning quite a breeze, not?

Of course, there will probably always be some things you don't want to
stick in there and do manually.  Things like /etc/passwd come to mind.

Anyway, just my 2 yen,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen       Epson Kowa Corporation, Research and Development