h1. ConfigurationManagement

h2. Sumarry

| Project   | Comments                                                                          |
| Ansible   | Probably well adapted to Trisquel                                                 |
| etckeeper | Too complicated to use for handling @/@, well suited for directories like @/etc/@ |


h2. Etckeeper

Etckeeper seemed a good start to at least be able to track the virtual machine configuration in git and be able to re-deploy it easily.

However it seems to have some limitations (tested with Trisquel 8):

* It expects sysadmins to only use etckeeper for a single directory like /etc/ or maybe /boot for special cases. It doesn't seem well suited for keeping @/@  under git. While some automatic commits can be disabled[1], it will for instance scan the whole directory and populate .etckeeper with many mkdirs. While this is highly desirable for @/etc/@, because without that some daemons might fail to start, it is clearly not desirable for @/@. The consequence is that any configuration outside of /etc/ will not be tracked by etckeeper. This behavior is governed by the code in @/etc/etckeeper/pre-commit.d/30store-metadata@ which doesn't contain any way to disable that behavior, and that still needs to run somehow as otherwise some of the permissions will probably not be correct.

fn1. It tend to do things automatically, but with @AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1@ and @AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL=1@ in @/etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf@, and doing @chmod -x /etc/etckeeper/init.d/70vcs-add@, it won't git add all the files under the directory it manages at boot and will not do automatic commit each days.