Thanks for etckeeper; I just used it in anger for the first time. I don't know for a fact that it really made my life better, but it makes me feel better. The story: I applied the usual security upgrade to my desktop box, and after rebooting, noted with dismay that my monitor, which had previously been happily running at 1280x1024, was now running at 640x480. (Typical Linux story.) So I poked around, and dimly remembered that I could run 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg', which I did. (I realize that's probably not the best tool for what I was doing, but it's all I remembered). That worked -- the monitor is now back to its old 1280x1024 self. Naturally the xorg.conf file is totally different; both the current version and the old version are utterly incomprehensible to me ... but the point is I've got a record of all of them, plus a comment explaining what I did and why. That's why etckeeper makes me feel better. Thanks again.

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Oops, it just saved my butt again. I swear I'll try not to append to this comment every time it proves useful ...

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Hey, I was wondering if there's any intention to support subversion?

Subversion is not a really good fit for etckeeper, especially because of all the .svn directories. I do not plan to work on supporting it myself, if someone works up a reasonable patch I'd probably apply it. --Joey

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What would you say is the best hosting site to use with etckeeper (git)? It should probably be private right?

etckeeper does not need a hosting site; it checks /etc into a git repository that is local to the machine.

If you want to push that repository elsewhere, I'd be sure to only push it to a machine that you control and trust. Gitweb is right out, in other words. --Joey

Also can you use etckeeper for backing up home directory dotfiles?

That's not its purpose, though you can find info elsewhere on my site about storing home in VCS. --Joey

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The idea of managing config files from remote computers sounds interesting to me. Is it possible to pull and push updates through git without loss of original metadata? Thanks in advance, Chris.

etckeeper restores the metadata when etckeeper init is run. --Joey

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Hi.

After using for couple of months my own template system for maintaining and distributing config files I decided to seek for a better solution (my scripts have many limitations, I'd like rather to improve some other tool, then my SVN-basing scripts). etckeeper looks quite nice, I'm just wondering if it would be possible to use it for tracking other directories too - some scripts installed in /usr/local/bin, some configs of out-of-distro applications located in /opt or /srv etc. Actually, what about setting up a repository in / directory and configuring .gitignore to ignore all but some explicit specified dirs? Am I asking for trouble? Maybe it would make sense to create a repository by default in /, put into ignore file by default

*

!/etc

and then all ignores regarding /etc, thus leaving to the user the choice what else will be tracked?

TIA, Richard.