Strategy for managing files in /etc, suggestions?

[Malcolm Matalka]

Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> writes:

> I use mercurial for managing all the little bash and python utilities
> that I write for my various Linux systems and it's very handy.
>
> I'm thinking that it would be an excellent idea to keep track of
> changes I do to system configuration files in /etc, I try to keep
> these to a minimum but some are inevitable.
>
> What's the best way of handling this, changes to very few files in a
> directory with (probably) thousands of files?  Is it best simply to
> copy them out to a development area, do changes there and copy them
> back to /etc?  I'm not entirely happy with this method but I can't
> really see a better way.  I suppose one could set up a mercurial
> repository in /etc and have a .hgignore that ignores everything then
> 'add' files that I'm changing.
>
> Does anyone else do anything like either of the above?  ... or is my
> OCD getting the better of me! :-)

Maybe look into xstow to take a repo and deploy it out to another
directory structure.  I use this for my dotfiles to some success.