On a sunny day (Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:56:16 +0000) it happened druck
 wrote in :

>On 27/02/2020 05:38, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> On a sunny day (Wed, 26 Feb 2020 20:33:07 +0000) it happened druck
>>  wrote in :
>>
>>> On 24/02/2020 11:52, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>>>> However, it did teach me a lesson, which is that its a very
>>>> good idea to make a copy of every file you change in /etc and its
>>>> subdirectories and keep the copies in one of your normal login user.
>>>
>>> Even better, install the etckeeper package. This will store all changes
>>> to files in etc in git repository. When you edit a file, you can either
>>> manually commit it with a comment explaining what you have done, or if
>>> you forget it will automatically commit them on a daily cron task. It
>>> also detects changes made by the package manager, so its easy to find
>>> out what happened if things go wrong.
>>>
>>> ---druck
>>
>> Even better, backup everything on a regular basis
>
>No, the above isn't about backups, its change management. If something
>stopped working because of a change to a file in /etc which happened
>several months ago, will you still have a backup of that file, and how
>many backups will you have to go through to find that change? Using etc
>keeper you have a log of every change to the file, so you can identify
>he breaking change, and either revert it either in whole or part.

I have backups of the whole system every so many days.
But really, if you get lost in something as simple as some config file
maybe better spent some time on figuring out how the system works.
I do think that Linux is being changed into the usual crap,
systemd, alsa, xorg comes to mind, my opinion.
OTOH as a platform to play around with... where will it go?
my raspis are still reliable, some on 24/7 for years....

What I do editing config files is make a copy
cp xxxconfig xxxconfig.org
and then rewrite it
Can always go back.
No need for yet an other silly tool.
Or just keep the old text in the config file as comment.
I do that even with scripts I wrote myself and change,
same scripts for different systems, just 2 days ago,
small C program, added a #define to select either x86 or arm / raspi the
header,
it calls netcat, Wy the ???xx do people always change command line options?
netcat on my x86 has different options than the raspi version!
WHEN will people list the command line options ALPHABETICALLY in --help?

Like:
'd' device
'h' help
'q' quit


Now try ffmpeg --help
:-)

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