Proposed guideline for init script files

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Sat, 2007-03-03 at 03:09 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Adam Jackson wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-03-02 at 12:07 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> >> On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 20:27 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> >>> On 2/28/07, Michael Schwendt <bugs.michael at gmx.net> wrote:
> >>>> It's called "to mess around in a system". Admins, who do that, often
> >>>> forget what files they've changed, and "rpm -Va" only reports the changed
> >>>> checksum, not a diff.
> >>> Hmmm, how much secret sauce would it take to make it easy to get a
> >>> diff of changes for scripts files which fail an rpm -V check. Probably
> >>> not really worth the pain of attempting to kludge together.
> >>>
> >>> -jef"goes off to sandwhich yumdownloader, rpm -V, rpm2cpio and diff
> >>> together inside a delicious perl wrapper"spaleta
> >>>
> >> Luke Macken, Will Woods, and I were talking about something just a
> >> little less ambitious at FudCON.  Just keeping a history of config
> >> files.  Here's a bit of a hack that could get you started.  The one
> >> glaring problem that I see with it is that it doesn't keep a copy of the
> >> original file.  ie: When I want to see the change, I probably want a
> >> diff3 between the original file, my modified file, and the file rpm is
> >> going to install.  Without the original, I can only see the changes
> >> between my modified file and the new one.
> > 
> > The last time this discussion came up, I suggested someone just go steal
> > code and/or ideas from Gentoo's etc-update, and no one seems to have
> > done so.
> > 
> > It's not like this is a new problem.
> > 
From the discussion, etc-update seemed to lack the ability to do diff3
with the original file as well.  Looking at the home page on gentoo's
site, it looks like etc-update is just a merge tool, not a history tool.
So you're often lacking context on a change (especially if it's a system
that you've only recently taken over maintenance of.)

Keeping a copy of each config file in a revision control system might be
overkill but it would solve these kinds of problems.  Keeping just
original, modified, and new versions would go a long way.

> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-July/msg00286.html
> 
> It is available as RPM even for Fedora is some third party repositories.

The link posted there doesn't work, but www.rpmfind.net still has
working links:
http://www.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/mandriva/10.0/contrib/i586/etc-update-20020731-5mdk.noarch.html

-Toshio
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