Re: looking for suggestions for managing a tree of server configs

> On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> david@lang.hm writes:
>>> I've got a directory tree that holds config data for all my
>>> servers. This consists of one directory per server (which is updated
>>> periodically from what is currently configured on that server), plus
>>> higher level summary reports and similar information.
>>>
>>> today I have just a single git tree covering everything, and I make a
>>> commit each time one of the per-server directories is updated, and
>>> again when the top-level stuff is created.
>>
>> It is quite clear to me what you are keeping at the top-level files,
>> but if a large portion of the configuration for these servers are
>> shared, it might not be a bad idea to have a canonical "gold-master"
>> configuration branch, to which the shared updates are applied, with
>> a branch per server that forks from that canonical branch to keep
>> the machine specific tweaks as differences from the canonical stuff,
>> instead of having N subdirectories (one per machine).
>
> In an ideal world yes, but right now these machines are updated by many
> different tools (unforuntantly including 'vi'), so these directories aren't
> the config to be pushed out to the boxes (i.e. what they should be), it's
> instead an archived 'what is', the result of changes from all the tools.
>
> The systems are all built with a standard image, but the automation tools I
> do have tend to push identical files out to many of the systems (or files
> identical except for a couple of lines)