[TriLUG] Keeping track of system changes

[Rick DeNatale]

> The CVS Book I keep mentioning at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/ gives a 
> couple
> of examples.  Both use make or rdist or something to distribute the files to
> the appropriate machines.  It looks like they're really thinking about do it
> yourself ways for multiple admins to maintain multiple systems in the same
> way that developers maintain code: revision history of past changes, ability
> to diff between revisions, simple roll back procedures for any change, and
> some sort of pre/post-commit triggers to verify some correctness.

Can you point me to where these examples are in the book? I downloaded
the 3rd edition and I can't seem to find them.

It would seem that you would need something like a "make install" step
to set the right permissions, ownerships etc.

> 
> Like I said, for me, it was just difficult to track what I had to change after
> every install.  With RH 9.0, I just copied the pristine copies of the files
> to a separate working directory and imported them.  Then I made all of my
> changes and committed them.  I'm hoping to be able to use the "vendor branch"
> stuff in CVS to merge my changes in with any changes RedHat/Fedora makes to
> those files in the future.

So are you saying that this is a one time thing after an install, or
are you making changes and commiting different versions over time?

And it also sounds like when you make changes you need to also copy
the changed files to their proper location, yes?