Re: Current best practices for system configuration management?

[Mike Castle <dalgoda@gmail.com>]

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

Like Alex, one of my physical machines is a laptop that is not always
on the home network.  Though I'm usually connected to *something*.
I'm still debating whether to bother with a VPN or trying something
like a tailnet.

Heck, before I adopted Debian and ran my own
Linux-from-Scratch-started-before-LFS-or-Debian-existed
"distribution", I used to run $HOME over NFS over WiFi.  Sharing
configs that way would be acceptable for me.  I also used to keep my
configs in CVS and pushed them using rsync-over-ssh-as-root, hence
"current best practices".  :->

Linux-Fan's MDVL stuff looks interesting.  Everything can always be
solved by one more layer of redirection.  :->  I just have to suss out
the Java and Ant stuff to understand the basics.  Personally, I'm a
big fan of NIH-Syndrome (otherwise I wouldn't have run a LFS type
system for ~15 years).  So it is likely I would reinvent what is
happening there.

One thing Linux-Fan mentioned was `config-package-dev`.  In my OP, I
commented about ``slightly old to really old tools'', and that was one
I was thinking of.  It looks like it hasn't been touched in seven
years, and I wasn't sure if it still worked.  But that drive by
comments lends some hope.  Using it would help address Alex's concern
about modifying existing config files.  That debhelper extension is
designed precisely for that situation.  But, its age is pretty much
what inspired me to start this thread.

Interestingly enough, I sent the OP just before I went to a BayLISA
talk about Apple's PKL.  Since I tend to only use whatever comes out
of the Debian repos (my only exceptions being Firefox and an emacs
package the maintainers won't fix for bookworm), I'm unlikely to do
more than look at it,  But, between it and MDVL, I think I'm
definitely going to try to make sure I don't configure myself into a
corner.  :->

Thanks for all of the commentary so far.

Once I get something working, I will *try* to remember to follow up
here with what I've managed to cobble together.

Cheers!
mrc

PS: Actually, I used to share $HOME (and /usr) over PLIP, so, it is
probably obvious that FS speed is not always a concern for me.