Are there some ways field-tested ways to keep a kind of logbook for a server? Including:

• software installations (and de-installations)
• custom configurations (e.g. of a webserver, ssh daemon, etc.)
• personal notes

The big picture. I am preparing a server and would like to extensively document the state and how it was established over time, so that a new person can easily see, what's going on and why. The setup is not too complicated, but I would like to do it anyway.

I once used something like Maintain /etc with mercurial on Debian and it was nice, but I am looking for a little more flexible solution.

Addendum: So I am interested in logging and documentation first. In an ideal world however, I would like to have a command, which in a few steps would take me from a bare newly installed unix system to a functional environment with all the components setup and in place by the means of, say an 'executable' log. But that would be very ideal, I imagine.