SVK for system management

I'm a big fan of using a version control system in conjunction with system administration. There's a great feeling to know that even if I screw up a configuration file, I have an easily accessible way to revert or track changes. To accomplish this, I was using SubVersion (SVN) as an administration tool.

However, SVN comes with some downsides, primarily the issue that it creates ".svn" folders in the directory tree. Which can cause issues and maybe even lead to security holes (yes/no? unsure about this).

So, maybe SVK is better suited.

Installing SVK on CentOS5

(See SVK - Distributed Version Control - Part I (Ron Bieber, 2004) for a good tutorial.)

1. Open up the package manager and make sure you have installed the following packages:

"subversion" (possibly not required)
"subversion-perl" (Perl bindings)

Or, using the command-line (for x86_64):

# yum install subversion.x86_64 subversion-perl.x86_64

At least... I think the above command works. I used the GUI package manager for this step.

2. Use Perl and CPAN to install the SVK system.

# perl -MCPAN -e 'install SVK'

You'll be presented with about a dozen questions, and you'll need to install all sorts of modules if this is your first time running that command. It's all pretty self-explanatory (and I was on the phone while doing that, so I wasn't able to jot everything down).

...

Well, after mucking with this for a few hours and getting self-test errors, I'm going to shelve this for now and go look at FSVS insteadk.