Re: [tlug] etckeeper

[Lars Kotthoff <lists@example.com>]

> Is anybody out there using etckeeper? If so:

I'm using etckeeper with a Git backend on a Debian machine and manual Git for
/etc on another machine. I don't do any backups of the repositories; they're
purely for versioning the local etc files. I also haven't used any branches yet.

In principle versioning /etc is a very good idea IMHO; although I've never
really needed it yet, I find myself worrying less about changes to config files
knowing that I can go back to the previous (working) state easily. I also
sometimes have a look at the diffs to see what I changed when and why (so
basically the same benefits you get from versioning your source code).

The thing I like about etckeeper on Debian is that I've got a hook for apt, so
every time I update the system, it automatically commits the changes. On the
machine where I do it manually, I sometimes forget to commit after I changed
something :)

What I like better about doing it manually is that the commit messages are
actually meaningful and I have better control over what gets committed when.

Annoyances -- none so far really, I have some binary stuff in /etc and sometimes
get useless diffs, but there's nothing I can do about that.

A word on performance with the Git backend -- it's really fast. I use it on a
router with a 333MHz CPU and 256MB RAM and commits, diffs, etc are almost
instantaneous. That's with only a few commits, but I have no reason to believe
that it wouldn't scale.

So in a nutshell, I can't see any reason not to do it, and have no strong
opinion on etckeeper vs pure Git. For a large number of machines etckeeper is
probably going to be better though.

Lars