From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 2 15:17:18 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-27-149-77.mmcable.com [24.27.149.77]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id EB59137B4E5 for ; Thu, 2 Nov 2000 15:17:15 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 12130 invoked by uid 100); 2 Nov 2000 23:17:10 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14849.62966.135429.2396@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 17:17:10 -0600 (CST) To: Archit P Shah Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: system files and version control In-Reply-To: <127732836@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Archit P Shah types: > 1) Are there good reasons to not put system files (/etc/passwd, /etc/group,...) > under version control? It seems like it would be useful to be able to see the > changes over time. (Not as a security measure, but as a way of doing sanity > checks). I certainly hope not - I keep a lot of them under version control! /etc/password wasn't one of them, because it tends to be edited by tools, not users. But lots of others (/etc/*.conf, /etc/fstab, kernel config files, qmail control files, and so on) are there, and it makes a *lot* of sense to do that. > 2) If there are no good reasons to avoid putting system files user version > control, does it make sense to build that into the distribution? (as an > option) It already is, and not as an option. RCS is part of the base system, though it doesn't look like much work is being done to maintain it (the GNU version is used pretty much as is). There are a number of tools for working with (and installing) cvs in ports/net and ports/devel. I use Perforce instead of CVS, and that can be installed from the ports as well.