[darcs-users] darcs for system administration?

[Isaac Devine]

Have you seen FAI? It's trival to add darcs support to it -
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ . The only thing it doesn't
support is #2 below. You could probably add support for that - just
check patch contents or something... FAI is just a collection of scripts
so it is very very easy to extend and change.

On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 17:11 -0400, Fredrik Wikefeldt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I started to write a tool for system administration half a year ago
> with the goals:
> 
> 1. Forcing sysadmins to revision control all changes to config files
> (like those in /etc)
> 
> 2. Ability to have different "change" permissions for different files
> in the same directory. For example, I don't want all sysadmins to be
> able to change the /etc/sudoers because then they are practically
> root.
> 
> 3. Ability to leave files in a directory like /etc out of revision
> control if I think those files will never be changed.  This in fact
> should be the standard. Thus, you start with the /etc tree you have
> after OS install (in my case the minimum Debian). After that, I can
> let apt-get add files and delete or change them too but only if they
> are not revision controled.  This might require modifying apt-get.
> 
> 4. When changing the actual /etc directory (by getting a version the
> revision control system), it should preferably be done no more
> disruptively than when you normally change configuration files.
> Whiping out the whole /etc and replacing it with another one is thus
> not desirable.
> 
> 5. Ability to block files from being revision controled.  Could be
> useful for files like /etc/passwd and /etc/group because you never
> want to revert to a previous  version where maybe a dismissed employee
> still had his account.
> 
> 6. Ability to cherry-pick changes. For example, if a mail server
> setting is changed on one server and I discover later that I want to
> do exactly that on another mail server, I can easily transfer the
> patch/change between the servers.
> 
> 
> I have written a Haskell program that does this except from the
> apt-get part and 4).
> But I used arch instead of darcs because I didn't know about darcs
> when I started. Sounds strange given that I did it in Haskell but I
> actually started writing it in bash, then went to python and then
> wrote it in Haskell after being convinced about type checking.
> 
> Now the question is, could I benefit from using darcs instead of arch
> apart from integration benefits stemming from both parts being
> writting in Haskell?
> But more importantly,  I'd like to know if I'm missing something
> important here. Is the program I've written interesting? Am I solving
> the right problem? Or maybe darcs can handle this right out of the
> box.
> 
> Best regards,
> Fredrik Wikefeldt
> Santiago de Chile
> 
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