RCS for managing config files

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:52:06 -0400
> Tom Metro <blu at vl.com> wrote:
> 
>> That's precisely what RCS prevents. The first person to check out and 
>> lock the file has exclusive write access until they unlock it.
> What CVS, subversion and other source control programs do is to allow
> multiple checkouts in a file. The problem occurs when there is a
> conflict. Resolving merge conflicts can be time consuming, but is a
> necessary task in a large development process. 

Subversion attempts to merge conflicts before bitching about them, and
does a pretty good job of it. Whether that's a desirable feature when
dealing with system config files is in the eye of the sysadmin.

The main thing that's prevented me from doing it, even though I'm only
one person, is that I've never been able to determine through research
whether the .svn directories would interfere with scripts that traverse
directories, like the startup scripts.  I've seen indications both ways,
and I don't want to hose my system by trying it.  My intuition tells me
that these scripts would skip dotted directories (because they probably
use *), but idunnoforsure.

I would love to be able to run some gui config tool then go int /etc and
do an svn diff.

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