[Infrastructures] RCS/CVS

[Pete Ehlke]

On Mon Jun 13, 2005 at 10:55:44 -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
>Brendan Strejcek wrote:
>
>> I also find that simply locking files is almost always what I actually
>> want. For example, if I am editing DNS zone files, other sysadmins
>> really should just wait, not take their own checkout and manage the
>> merge later.
>
>Of course we know that the zone serial number is always a merge
>conflict on DNS zone files.  Fortunately that is also an easy one to
>understand.
>
People still edit live zone files by hand? Madness.

I mean, this is a special case of a generic problem- configuration data
should always be generated by a reliable process that reads a simple
canonical source and writes syntactically correct configs- but of all
things, DNS zone files are a plain nightmare to maintain by hand. It's
just too damn easy to forget a trailing . somewhere, incorrectly
increment serial numbers, hork up the value of $ORIGIN... Even Vixie
tells people to let perl generate their zone files:

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2005-04/msg00300.html

-Pete