I'm in the process of developing my own Linux system (built on LFS). Not exactly what I would call a distro (its early days :-)), but I would eventually like to share it amongst friends and anyone else who may be interested as well as several different machines that I own.

Ive got the system to the point where it boots and I can login. It is VERY minimal, now I need to (and am about to) start working on my system specific tools / configurations however, before I do I would like to setup a cvs repo to store any and all changes made, along with all the software that I develop for it.

Ideally I would like to be able to make / my working directory, however, this doesn't really seem possible / feasible. Ive asked this question on many Linux boards, {linux,cvs} irc channels and have googled plenty but don't seem to be getting any help.

Has anyone here got ANY theories on how exactly I could setup a cvs so that I can checkout my changes directly into / of a live/working Linux OS? How do distro devs do it?

I know this sounds pretty silly considering the project Ive just described myself undertaking but I'm really not all that knowledgeable when it comes to cvs.

If it helps any, I will probably be doing most of my dev work from within another OS and chroot into my (LFS) system.

Any ideas would be MUCH appreciated.

Using CVS to track changes to system binaries isn't really practical. Although it will work, CVS doesn't handle changes to binaries in a way that lets you diff or merge, so it won't provide you with useful information. Unless they've changed the functionality and I just haven't kept up... If you want to track changes to the binaries you compile and deploy, you can keep the sources you compiled from and back them up somewhere else.

CVS does work well for text files so you could manage directories like /etc and /usr/local/etc.

Either way I don't recommend checking out to the root of your file-system. Check out to a working directory to work on managed files, then check them in again. When you want to deploy files, you can export them to a temporary location and move them from there. It sounds like extra work and I've probably made it sound that way because I'm against it

Just my