On a related note...

[John5342]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> You know what was the painless part of this re-install?  After firing up google
> chrome, I didn't need to reinstall anything for it.  It's all synced with gmail.
>
> I find myself wishing that all my fedora packages could be restored just like
> that.
>
> Oh sure, there's a few methods for automaticing installs.  But none are so
> brain-dead easy.  Imagine, just 1 click (or command) to sync all the packages
> (and maybe /etc?) to some server, and 1 step to reinstall back to the last
> state.
>
> What's that?  Wouldn't work over upgrades?  Somehow it does for chrome.  And for
> android.

The difference is that chrome/chromium is a small target. They know
precisely how the data is stored, the types of data stored, what is or
is not compatible, what settings are safe to transfer and what only
makes sense on a specific machine. To do the same for /etc in general
would require the synchronization system to know everything about
every single package that might ever install some configuration file
into /etc. In addition /etc contains files that can be arbitrarily
edited by humans. Chrome on the other hand only has to deal with
configuration controlled through the browser and any changes that
aren't recognized can simply be thrown away.

If however you feel it is safe to just transfer any configuration file
from one version of Fedora to another without checking first then
there are already packages available to do that in Fedora with only
minor effort on your part. Examples include etckeeper, any backup
program or if you are willing to invest a little time up front puppet.
You could even play some games with btrfs snapshots.

-- 
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary
and those who don't...