begin  quoting Gus Wirth as of Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 04:25:55PM -0700:
> Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
[snip]
> >Having everything under VCS also lets me relax my "no root password" 
> >policy a bit.

...and now you have my attention. :)

> >                I can do an install of some software, check it out, and 
> >be *sure* as to whether it's uninstall did the right thing or not.  And, 
> >if not, I can force the revert.
> 
> Does OS X not have packages like Debian or Fedora? 

Sorta. There's a package system for some stuff, but it requires root
access, and a lot of applications don't use it (which is a feature!).

>                                                    Since VMware is 
> mostly made up of binary files, does this mean you store entire binaries 
> when differences arise (not that big a deal since disk is cheap)?
 
/me listens intently

> How would this work for a system that is under package management and 
> you have to revert the database that goes along with the packages?

I've been wanting a package management system that can rebuild the
package database from what's actually installed, just for this reason.
If I uninstall something and it *still* leaves crap around, I'm going
to reach for rm -rf, dammit.

The fact that "package management systems" can't (easily) handle that
is a sign that they aren't there yet.

Oddly enough, Sun's package system *can* handle manual additions and
removals, but the commands are slightly obscure and not often used,
so far as I can tell.

> I'm not sure I would see the need for this if a system has LVM and you 
> can just take snapshots and then revert if something doesn't work right.

There's also tripwire, which at least tells you what changed, if not
how to revert.

-- 
Could we build a linux distro / package system that did this natively?
Stewart Stremler


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