CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixfreebsdfossil
Registered User
Registered User

Reputation: 265

Use Fossil for system files?

As a new user of Fossil, I'm curious if there are any negative implications with using Fossil to store things like /etc/, /usr/local/etc files from Unix like systems like FreeBSD & OpenBSD. If I'm doing this for multiple systems, I think I'd create a branch with each hostname to track those files.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 215

Answers (1)

Roland Smith
Roland Smith

Reputation: 43523

System configuration files stored in /etc, /var or /usr/local/etc can generally only edited by the root user. But since root has complete access to the whole system, a mistaken command there can have dire consequences.

For that reason I generally use another location to keep edited configuration files, a directory in my home-directory that I call setup, which is under control of git. Since I have multiple machines running FreeBSD, each machine gets its own subdirectory. There is a special subdirectory of setup called shared for those configuration files that are used on multiple machines. Maintaining multiple copies of identical files in separate repositories or even branches can be a lot of extra work.

My workflow is the following;

  1. Edit a configuration file in my repository.
  2. Copy it to its proper location.
  3. Test the changes. If problems occur, go back to step 1.
  4. Commit the changes to the revision control system. Copy the committed files to their proper location.

Initially I had a shell script (basically a list of install commands) to install the files for me. But I also wanted to see the differences between the working tree and the installed files.

So for my convenience, I wrote a script called deploy to help me with this. It can tell me which files in the repo are different from the installed files and can show me the differences. It can also install files to their proper locations.

Upvotes: 4

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