[conspire] etckeeper hagiography 6.0/Squeeze upgrade

[Nick Moffitt]

Rick Moen:
> One thing I've noticed is that, when doing a massive apt-get upgrade
> operation, it's really vital to _copy and paste_ into a buffer
> anything from the package advisory notices that might be important.

I'd add to this that etckeeper (well packaged in Debian and its
derivatives) is also fantastic for post-mortem analysis of upgrades.  It
will use the VCS of your choice to commit changes to /etc before and
after any dpkg operation.  It's automatic, so it's one of those things
like backups or logs where it only ever occurs to you when you need it
most.

I tend to use bazaar just because I can't abide git's interface choices
(git reminds me of TLA back in 2003 or so), and that lets me run "bzr
blame" on a file to see which changed lines correspond to which
revisions in the VCS, I can use bzr diff to generate diffs between
arbitrary revisions, and bzr log will let me get an overall timeline of
when I did upgrades (since timestamps on files in /etc will not give you
this information).

You can also provide hooks for when to commit yourself.  On some systems
I insist on committing manually, and it can be helpful to run a "bzr
status" and see all the *.dpkg-* files listed in the "unknown:"
category.

-- 
BitKeeper, how quaint.
                -- Alan Cox