Versioning in /etc

jhwilliams · 02-22-2012, 06:26 PM

I often want to see what changes I've made in /etc, because I've forgotten.

I suppose one thing you could do is initialize a git repository in /etc after installing the OS.

In apt-based OSs, is there a command to show the modifications one has made against files, compared to what is in the repository?

Something like:

Code:

dpkg-diff-against-repo /path/to/file

Or any other method of accomplishing this (other than the Git idea -- it's too late for me on this system.)

MS3FGX · 02-22-2012, 08:28 PM

I don't believe there is any built-in function for that, no. The accepted method here is, like you said, run some kind of version control software against /etc (git, CVS, etc).

I suppose if you really wanted to see what had changed, you could manually unpack a package and look at the files it contains.

Dark_Helmet · 02-22-2012, 08:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jhwilliams

Or any other method of accomplishing this (other than the Git idea -- it's too late for me on this system.)

Nope, it's not too late. Though, my solution will entail a decent bit of work

1) Install VirtualBox, VMWare, KVM or whatever virtual machine software you like.
2) Install your distro+version on the virtual machine
3) Install all the same packages on your real machine into your virtual machine. See this other thread for how to handle that efficiently.
4) Tar your virtual machine's /etc directory
5) Move the tarball to your physical machine through whatever method you like (e.g. shared folders, usb pendrive, email)
6) Un-tar the virtual machine's etc directory in some temporary location
7) import the virtual machine's etc into whatever version control system you like
8) verify the import by checking out the files in another location
9) do a recursive copy (e.g. "cp -a" ) from you production /etc on top of the just-checked-out version
10) commit your "changes"

At that point, you should have something very, very close to what you were originally after... just without any step-wise revision history.

Then you need to decide whether you want your production /etc directory to be tied into your version control, or if you want to mess with the files elsewhere and "publish" changes to /etc.

If your /etc is going to tied into your repository, you'll likely need to boot off a live CD and do the checkout into your /etc, but make a backup copy just in case.

jhwilliams · 02-23-2012, 10:58 AM

Hey guys,

Thanks for the responses. They got me thinking. One could implement a dpkg-repo-diff command like this:

1. Accept 0..n paths on command line.
2. for each item, get the package it came from. Expand the package and diff the contents against the path given.

That is, (in pseudo code (three minutes here, not looking to flesh out, just an overview.))

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# dpkg-repo-diff [pathspec ...]

paths="$@"
for path in $paths; do
    # Figure out what package it came from
    pkg_owner=$(dpkg -S $path | awk '{ print $1 }')
    
    # get and unpack the package
    # TODO

    # diff the two items
    diff $path /path/to/unpacked/copy    
done