F20 Self Contained Change: Snapshot and Rollback Tool

[Miloslav Trmač]

2014-03-07 18:32 GMT+01:00 Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>:

> On Mar 7, 2014, at 6:51 AM, Miloslav Trmač <mitr at volny.cz> wrote:
>
>
>    - For configuration: What we really want is a VCS, dealing with
>    changesets, documenting who has changed what, when and why.  Snapshots are
>    a really poor VCS.
>
> Obviously we don't have all that technology that we "really want", or at
> least not in a way that is ready to deploy, but we kind of have snapshots.
> Let's just not think that snapshots are "right".
>
> To do VCS correctly requires application opt-in, and an API to manage it.
>

Yes, ideally; but actually it would still be useful for every
fedora-server-role-manage subcommand to:
1) check if /etc has changed at all since the last committed state; if so,
(git commit -m 'Unknown unmanaged changes between $timestamp and
$timestamp'), and optionally alert an admin
2) perform the primarily role of the subcommand as intended
3) (git commit -m 'performed $command for $user'), unless the admin has
explicitly disabled autocommit.  (Asking for a rationale in the change log
should be an option but probably not default.)

We could then expand this from fedora-server-role-manage to other tools.


> How do I get revision control with file formats that don't support it like
> RTF, txt, PNG, TIFF, etc?
>

The way we already do this with git: git gives you full revision control,
and we lack the tools show the differences in a nice UI or to do a
reasonable three-way merge.  But note that revision control is still quite
useful in this scenario: it gives you the ability to go back in time, to
track responsibility and rationale for changes, and if you really need to,
you can compare the content manually.
     Mirek
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