VCS as a rollback system?

Just wondering, would it be possible to use a VCS such as Subversion - set up in a Linux system's root directory - as a way of rolling back changes? e.g. you make commits before upgrades, and if something breaks you can switch back to the last good commit.

I'm guessing there's a very good reason I've never heard of anyone doing this? Would handling 3+ GB of binary files make things prohibitively slow, even with binary diffs?

 

And N/M, the reason is that rsync does this better.

 

yes i do that a lot on fedora/redhat base systems

yum rollback

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=265473

but on ubuntu base i dont know

 

wajig can backup packages before they are upgraded. (It's in the repos)

http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/Wajig_Overview.html

Upgrade all of the installed packages:
$ wajig upgrade
options:
-b backup packages about to be upgraded onto some default directory
--backup=DIR backup packages about to be upgraded onto a given directory
-n --noauth skip the authentication verification prompt before the upgrade

Run wajig --backup=<backup directory> upgrade so that in case of trouble, you can run dpkg --install <DEB file> inside the directories.



Edit: (It uses dpkg-repack - see quote below). So even if you have nothing in /var/cache/apt/archives/ due to regularly using apt-get clean, wajig will repackage an installed package that is to be upgraded and place it in a time-stamped folder, before the upgrade takes place.