How to setup etckeeper with Mercurial in Ubuntu?

I'm interested in installing etckeeper with Mercurial in my Ubuntu system. My reason is that I don't know how to use Git and don't want to learn at the moment. If I check the package description it sounds promising:

kent@rat:~$ apt-cache search etckeeper
etckeeper - store /etc in git, mercurial, or bzr

I'm wondering how to continue on from here? I've tried Googling but I haven't found anything for the Ubuntu + etckeeper + Mercurial combination.

(If you know of a good tutorial for this situation, a link is an excellent answer. No need to re-iterate.)

Solution 1:

I am using etckeeper on both debian and ubuntu. It's painless.

Just do a sudo etckeeper init and you're done!

Actually, you may need to edit /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf to check that hg is selected as your VCS command. But that's all that you need to do.

Once that is done etckeeper will begin tracking every change that you make to files in /etc and commit those changes to the local repository. This happens automatically whenever you run apt-get on anything and also as a nightly cron-job.

However, if you wish to push your changes to a remote repository, you will need to do it manually or setup something else to do it for you.

Solution 2:

On my system (Ubuntu Karmic), besides setting VCS="hg", I had to edit /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf and add the following or else etckeeper commit would complain about a missing username:

HG_COMMIT_OPTIONS="-u etckeeper@aeolus"

Also, in /etc/.hg/hgrc, I added the following:

[ui]
username = root@aeolus

That way, when I do a commit through etckeeper, the username on that commit will be etckeeper@aeolus, and if I do a commit manually via mercurial, it will show up as root@aeolus.