[rancid] Rancid and Git

[Tore Anderson]

* Brown, David M JR

> For us, the feature fits well into the rest of our git repository
> management we have internally. We have a centralized git server where
> all configuration for internal applications is stored and supporting
> a subversion server is replication of support overhead that shouldn't
> be needed.

+1

We've phased out all instances of RCS, CVS, and SVN in favour of Git
which we consider superior in pretty much any way. So we have a lot of
processes and systems that build on top of Git, like issue trackers and
web based repository browsers with nice coloured side-by-side diffs and
such. There's just no way we would want to keep the old stuff around
solely for RANCID.

> Furthermore, git, like most distributed SCMs, supports pushing and
> pulling to multiple locations this means that multiple rancid
> deployments could be hooked into one central git repository. At least
> for us we have managed switches that are not accessible (due to
> security or support concerns) from broader networks. The ability to
> setup a tree of git repositories to aggregate our network
> configurations to a central place is a big feature for us.

Again +1.

Another thing we find useful is that once you set up the RANCID
server(s) to automatically push changes to a central Git repository,
then you can easily allow other systems which have some use for parsing
the network configs to use Git to easily fetch updated copies from that
central location. Those system do not need to have access to or even
know about the individual servers running RANCID.

Speaking of Git, I would also suggest to move the development of RANCID
itself into a publicly available Git repository like GitHub. I find it
much easier to contribute my own changes back upstream this way, find
the exact code that introduced bugs (git-bisect is just pure awesome),
and so on. Contributing a patch to RANCID proper, on the other hand,
seems to be to fire off a patch to this mailing list with no way to
verify that it still works or even applies cleanly to the current
development head. I'd guess this is partially the reason why the
rancid-git fork has become more than "vanilla RANCID + Git integration"
but actually have other changes too, like new device scripts and such.

John, if you've not familiarised yourself with Git yet I would strongly
recommend that you invest some time in doing so, you won't regret it...
It's not without reason that a huge number of open-source projects have
converted to Git.

Tore