Josselin Mouette wrote: > Marc Haber <mh+debian-de...@zugschlus.de> wrote: > On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 21:58:13 +0100, Jean-Christophe Dubacq > <jcduba...@free.fr> wrote: > >[ ? 11/11/2015 18:14 ] [ ? Marc Haber ] > >> Once and for all we're doing _SOMETHING_ right, let's keep it that > >> way. > >I do not agree that we are doing something exactly right. I would > like > >/etc to only contain what I changed (as a sysadmin), and nothing > else ; > > That is not what an experienced Unix Admin would expect. We should not > do that. > > As an experienced Unix admin, I hate having to comb through megabytes of > useless files in /etc to look for what has been actually changed on the > system.
Agreed. I think the mythical "experienced UNIX admin" is quite capable of learning new things, especially when those things make their life easier. > The very fact that people need to use specific tools such as etckeeper, > just to be able to see what has been configured, shows that we are doing > something wrong, not the other way round. While I still think etckeeper makes sense (and works even better) with only admin changes kept in /etc, I'd certainly love it if I could tell exactly what's *unique* about a given system by looking at the tiny handful of files in /etc. A few weeks ago, I set up a new virtual server to replace my previous one, and I needed to migrate all the configuration over from one to the other. (In the process, I also upgraded to the latest stable version of Debian instead of oldstable.) Installing Debian took a few minutes. Migrating the configuration across, even *with* the help of etckeeper, took the better part of a day, most of which was spent staring at and filtering diffs between two versions of /etc, and attempting to find my own configuration changes out of the mountain of irrelevant changes between stable releases in order to find my own configuration bits. By contrast, if /etc contained only my changes, I'd have had a far easier time with that migration. - Josh Triplett
