How to check what files have been customised in /etc?

[Colin Law]

On Sun, 13 Dec 2020 at 11:14, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2020 at 10:08:35AM +0000, David Fletcher wrote:
> > On Sun, 2020-12-13 at 09:58 +0000, Chris Green wrote:
> > > I try as far as possible to keep my system 'standard' with as much as
> > > possible of the custmisation being in /home where I use mercurial to
> > > keep track of changes (and which is preserved when OS is upgraded).
> > >
> > > However there are inevitably a few global customisations in /etc and
> > > I'd like to track them as well if possible.  I can configure ways to
> > > track them now but can anyone suggest a way to find all the changes I
> > > have done over the years in /etc?  I don't think there are all that
> > > many of them but I know there are some and there are likely to be
> > > some
> > > I can't remember how I did.
> >
> > I always comment my changes with reason, initials and date. Then a
> > search for my initials turns them up.
> >
> That's an excellent idea, I'll do similar from now on.  However I
> still need to find older changes, I guess I can just do a manual
> search and/or add suitable comments as I find them.

An additional note for the future.  For systemd files, rather than
change the file itself it is usually better to use the override
feature to add additional files that apply the overrides that you
want, then they are not affected if the original is overwritten by an
update.  This link shows how to do that using systemctl edit.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/659267/how-do-i-override-or-configure-systemd-services

For non systemd files many packages allow the use of override conf
files, for example mosquitto expects the config file
/etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf but also picks up overrides from any
.conf file in /etc/mosquitto/conf.d.   Similarly apt picks up sources
from /etc/apt/sources.list but will also pick up any .list file in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d.
For such cases if you add those files rather than changing the
original it can make your life easier.

Colin

>
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> Chris Green
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