I recently thought it would be a good idea to version control the /etc directory. Using subversion, I added and committed ... and all hell broke loose.
It seems, for some god unforsaken reason, during a commit, svn will copy (or link?) the file being committed, read the temp copy, and then move that file back into place, clobbering the original file. This is so obscure, I've never noticed it before - but it has the net effect of clobbering whatever file permissions happened to be there before. Naturally, in the /etc directory, that destroys the world. The first thing after commit, sudo wouldn't work anymore (permissions should be 444, are 644, abort) which effectively meant the machine got bricked. (It's an amazon machine, so by default you can't become root; you must rely on sudo). Fortunately I had just created a snapshot, so it was easy to revert... But still. This behavior caught me *very* much by surprise. Question is: What do you use to version control permission sensitive files? Subversion doesn't give a damn about permissions, so even after I clean up this mess, I think I should probably avoid it.
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