Putting /etc under Revision Control...

Using Etckeeper

The etckeeper program is a tool to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, or bzr repository. It hooks into APT to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades.

See package's README file

Using svk

/!\ svk and etcinsvk were removed from Debian in Squeeze, since svk is dead upstream.
see 554335, 557074.

svk is a decentralized version control system written in Perl. It uses the subversion filesystem.

Install svk 

apt-get install svk

Initialize a depot in ~root/.svk 

svk depotmap --init

Import /etc making it a working copy 

svk import --to-checkout //etc /etc

Make your depot not that readable 

chmod -R go-rwx ~/.svk

Remove volatile files from revision control 

cd /etc
svk rm -K adjtime ld.so.cache

...and voilà, you have etc under revision control, without CVS or .svn or {arch} files around. The syntax of svk is just like the syntax of svn, of which it's a distributed extension.

See Also