rollback capability for linux config files and scripts

Satish Balay balay at fastmail.fm
Tue Mar 11 22:27:09 CDT 2008


On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

> On 2008-03-11 16:35, Satish Balay <balay at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> >On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Marcin Kasperski wrote:
> >>>> Frequently, when I modify my scripts or config files on my Linux box I'm
> >>>> afraid I'll break something and hence make a manual backup copy. This only
> >>>> gets me a manual, rudimentary rollback capability. I was looking into using
> >>>> cvs / mercury / subversion to help me get this a little more efficient and
> >>>> safer.
> >>>> (...)
> >>>
> >>> If its just keeping track of changes to a few files spread out [in
> >>> different directories], I would just use RCS. Its primary purpose was
> >>> to track individual files changes anyway..
> >> 
> >> RCS does not handle file renames, removals etc, not to mention symlinks.
> > 
> > rename:
> > 
> > mv foo bar; mv RCS/foo,v RCS/bar,v
> > 
> > delete:
> > 
> > rm foo; [optionally rm RCS/foo,v]
> 
> Oops, you just lost the history of the `rename' and `delete'
> operation itself (unrecoverably too, since there is no way to
> find out anything about the rename/delete in a month or so).
> 
> While RCS is a neat tool for handling a small set of files,
> and it does have some bits of smarts about permissions, Marcin
> is also right about renames and deletes :)

As acknowledged before - RCS is a tool to track changes to individual
files. So yes, it has no concept of repostiories [or a group of
files], or info on the location of file that is tracked. It servers in
its limited scpoe of tracking changes to individual files - wherever
the files are located..

Satish



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