Using mercurial to track host configuration

[Gil]

I'm new to mercurial and would appreciate any advice that the list
gurus have to offer.  I'd like to use mercurial to track
configuration changes on UNIX hosts and have a few comments and
questions.

Mercurial is particularly attractive for host configuration
management because it doesn't leave little CVS or .svn turds lying
around everywhere.  These cause problems with some programs that
expect to use all files in a directory as configuration files (e.g.
/etc/logrotate.d for logrotate).  Also, not having to use a central
repository removes all sorts of machine inter-dependencies that I'd
rather avoid.


I'd run into a problem with mercurial 0.9 in that I couldn't use a
repository in the root directory:

cd /
hg init
hg status
abort: path contains illegal component:

I found and applied this patch to make things work:

http://hg.intevation.org/mercurial/crew?cs=3711e23ab10a

It would be fantastic if this patch made it into the next stable
release of mercurial.  (I think it may have been addressing issue
228 but can't be sure.)


One use case I'm not clear on is how to re-apply configuration
changes against a new copy of a machine with an updated OS.  With
CVS this was frustrating because I'd have to do something like this
to review what changed without killing the local files:

    cd /var/tmp
    cvs co machines/`hostname`
    cd machines/`hostname`
    find . -type d -name CVS | xargs -i mv {} /{}

At this point I could use the usual cvs diff and friends to review
what changed between my working configuration and the new OS.

Assuming I hg push to an off-site location or keep backups of my
/.hg* files do I get similar behavior from mercurial just by
restoring /.hg* onto the new machine?


Are there any other pitfalls others are aware of when it comes to
this kind of usage?  Is anyone else tracking machine configuration
in this way with any degree of success?

Thanks in advance,

--Gil