Q: Keeping the repository elsewhere via a symlink for .bzr

[Tim Meadowcroft]

I've been using bzr happily for my s/w development work, but now thought I'd 
look at using it to keep track of the changes I make to system folders such as 
/etc and /boot (yes, I've seen etckeeper and similar).

I think I know much of what's involved (files that need ignoring etc) but I'd 
prefer NOT to have the repositories storing the files in the folders themselves 
- /boot for example is a small partition and /etc may become it's own small 
partition too. So I was considering putting the repositories somewhere else (say 
under /var) and tried a small experiment... started a branch in a test folder 
and added files, then moved the .bzr folder elsewhere and replaced it with a 
symlink pointing at the new location.

This seemed to work fine, bzr commands worked happily, my text folder now has 
just 2 extra files (.bzr symlink and .bzrignore, which I may symlink too), all 
seems joy and light, and such a setup would mean I could now centralise my local 
repositories for further sys-admin (eg a cron job that then each night does a 
"bzr push" of these to another machine)... but am I doing something very wrong? 

I've scoured various docs and forums and can't find any mention of such a 
practice either for or against - is it so wrong that no one even thinks of it, 
or so trivial that it's not worth mentioning ? Or is there a much better way to 
achieve my aims - a bzr record of a tree which doesn't have the repository files 
in the same filesystem as the tree itself ?

Cheers

--
Tim