Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Configuration file versioning

[Sascha Ziemann]

Kevin Geiss <address@hidden> writes:

> you folks who use tla for tracking /etc; how do you handle the /etc dirs of 
> multiple machines, parts of which are the same, parts of which are different?
>
> for example, I'd want the /etc/passwd files to be the same, 
> but /etc/exim/exim.conf will be different. 
>
> do you just have a separate branch for each machine? or do you just track 
> each 
> machine completely seperately?

The versioning tool should not try to be a NIS replacement.  If you
use NIS or something similar the NIS server is the right place to do
the versioning.

More important is the feature to preserve the meta data, if a client
operating system does not support them.  For example: if someone
checks out a Unix etc directory tree on a windows system, it is
necessary for Arch to realize that the operating system is not able
to handle Unix permissions.  The difference between the rights on the
Windows file system and the contents in the repository must not be seen
as an permission change.

The same problem occurs when an normal user checks out the etc
directory tree, which is owned by root.  This information must be
stored in the local {arch} directory so that the difference doesn't
get interpreted as an owner change.

Regards,
Ziemann