RE: CVS'ing home directory files; CVS in place

[Glew, Andy]

> If you just use 'su' properly and plain old SCCS or RCS in the actual
> directories where you modify configuration files then you'll have good
> solid CM without the ability to "loose" changes.  This is especially
> easy and even trivial if you use a wrapper script on your editor that
> does all the check-outs and commits, or if you use Emacs where such
> ability is directly integrated and immediately available.
> 
> I.e. CVS is almost always the wrong tool for systems administration.


I don't understand where CVS is weaker than plain old SCCS or RCS
in this regard.  

Oh, sure: if you do a blind update you may import changes to machine1
that are meant for machine2 and don't work on machine1. But, the same
thing happens if you have symlink shared RCS or SCCS directories.

Moral: update/merge is not always the right thing to do
- certainly not for system config files (and not for some
other source code files in my experience, although it works well
in some situations.).