Re: Storing /etc in a repository

>>Actually, shadow, group, passwd, etc... are not being vc-ed, for that
>>very reason. They're not complex files, and I don't work heavily with
>>them -- so why bother?
>
>
> It really depends what you are doing, and what are yours requirements:
> I would be very, very unhappy if some bit fungus eats those files, and
> I had to re-create them from scratch (especially /etc/group).

I don't keep any files with passwords in my repository for security
reasons. In our environment, this means only ignoring shadow. group and
passwd don't contain passwords (nor would they in most setups), so they
should be safe to version.
I'm pretty sure (though have not tested) that you can recreate shadow
automatically from passwd should you have a catastrophic failure - of
course you'll lose your passwords, but given it's a server I don't think
there's more than 2 or 3 passwords in shadow (all other accounts are
service accounts).

As for how to get /etc into the repository, I did it as per the in place
import instructions, but added things non-recursively so as to ensure I
got all the files that should be ignored
eg
# svn st | grep \?
? passwd
? shadow
? apache
...
# svn add -N apache passwd
# svn propedit svn:ignore . (add shadow to the list)

As well as passwords, you probably also want to avoid files that change
constantly, /etc/mtab and /etc/adjtime are two examples of this, they
can be recreated by programs and any version in the repository will
probably be out of date.

In order to make sure the repository is kept up to date, I wrote a cron
job that runs "svn st -u" daily and sends any output to administrators
so as to remind them to commit their changes.

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