Last time I investigated this etckeeper tried to use yum or something to do per package commits, which doesn't work - but this would be nice to have!

I've hooked etckeeper in arch via pacman post-install hooks. It doesn't look like there are such hooks in rpm-ostree... 💩

What if we just did a git commit and push after every boot?

That could be just a service file then! - etckeeper-boot.service if something has changed, commit + push

We could. May not catch all of the individual changes - but it would probably be sufficient.

Hmm. I don't recall this using yum or anything per-package but then again I have run this under Ubuntu so no yum present. I did manage to layer it in on the Fedora 38 base and it mostly worked but somehow broke the ability to upgrade since it seems to install the dnf package so maybe there is something to the yum per-package assertion. It seems likely we could just generate a custom rpm that did not have that dependency and it would work at least minimally.

I looked a bit into this and it seems that since etckeeper has hooks for specific package managers built in, and thus the standard Fedora package has a dependency on dnf. It does not seem that etckeeper has any knowledge of rpm-ostree as a package manager and I didn't dig too deeply to find out how complicated that may be to implement.

I wonder if we can just create a custom RPM package without the dependency on dnf to at least be able to install it without breaking things. Then the etckeeper-boot.service mentioned above would be enough.

OK, so I looked through the etckeeper sources and it doesn't seem too complicated. My first, completely untested, not even built, swag at this is here.

The more complicated part, I believe, will be in the rpm packaging, of which I know nothing. If I'm right, the spec file for the Fedora package is here and will need updates to support this. In fact the changes I made in my fork only make things cleaner. I think if we can make the spec file somehow know that it is "Fedora" but the rpm-ostree variant, then we can simply disable the dnf plugin.

Anyone know Fedora packaging that may want to help?

rip