[Yum] In pursuit of 32-bit => 64-bit upgrade path

[Les Mikesell]

Seth Vidal wrote:
> 
>>
>> Version control of files that you change is always a good thing, but 
>> configuration management tools always add some bizarre abstraction 
>> layers of their own that don't seem portable or likely to handle major 
>> changes in the underlaying file structure.  Are there any handy tools 
>> to just throw the files that RPM knows you've changed into subversion 
>> or a similar version control tool so there is no extra effort or 
>> abstraction to learn to be able to backtrack to find what changes were 
>> made and when?  With viewvc you could do all the human interaction 
>> with a web browser with an obvious layout.
>>
> 
> I wrote one at one point. All it really does is run an rpm -Va in python 
> and spit back to you the list of all the files which are changed. 
> Unfortunately it is not the quickest of processes and it won't get all 
> the files which you've ADDED which are not in an rpm.

To be really useful, it would have to be able to retrieve an original 
unchanged version of the base rpm-installed copy the first time it 
notices a file has been changed, commit that, then the changed version - 
and do additional commits after each subsequent change.  Extra points if 
it can track multiple similar machines as branches so you can easily 
diff among them as well as different times on the same machine.

Or, just start with a complete copy of the /etc tree and commit all 
changes, which would catch your additions.  Maybe an automated pass 
could add comments for the versions that were unchanged from an RPM 
install/update and you'd have a chance to manually commit with comments 
after your own changes if you wanted so a history view of a file would 
make sense.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com