Slashdot Mirror
Home Directory In CVS
shamir_k writes "Joey Hess has come up with an innovative solution to a problem we have all faced. He's put his whole home directory in CVS. Not only can he move between multiple computers easily, he also has automatic distributed backups."
I wonder why CVS, and not something more advanced, like Arch or Subversion? Especially since he outright complains about common limitations in CVS, like moving files and dealing with directories at all. If he's hoping, as he says, "for a better replacement some day", why not see what the present has to offer?
I mean, that's not to say that alternative systems are perfect, either. I'm going through the process of learning arch now. There's a learning curve, but not nearly as big as it's made out to be. Still, using something else (almost anything else) would probably help on things like the merging issues, especially since he mentions that sometimes it's a pain keeping things in sync between three of his machines.
You wouldn't do this in Bitkeeper if you were a privacy freak. Remember, the Bitkeeper liscense requires that you maintain open logging. Realistically, this means that info about what files you change get transmitted across the network; I don't know if it's encrypted or not. It's not that big of a deal, but I'm sure someone here would care.
/home repo across (say) three or more machines, since you could take advantage of its more complex merge operators. Arch or SVN also might be good ideas. (Don't have any experience with Subversion, though.)
That being said, doing it in BK would be a compelling alternative if you wanted to use the same
It had a filestore with file versioning - about 30 years ago.
I'll get modded down to oblivion for mentioning an MS product in a positive light, but Windows XP+2003 Server supports this already.
Users can rollback to previous revisions of files that they've saved to the 2k3 server, saving the sysadmins the time of restoring *another* accidently deleted file from the backup tapes.
To make this more legible- a text editor, for example, does not have the file open the entire time waiting for input. It opens the file, reads it, then closes it at startup. When the user hits save (through keyboard commands, mouse click, whatever), the editor opens the file again, this time in write mode, writes the data, and closes it. By this model, close could be the commit function, and open could be the checkout function.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It's been quite a while since I used VMS... IIRC the problems we had we the VMS versioning:
- It created a new version every time you saved, so just going through a few change/compile/fix cycles (for example) would create lots of versions clogging up the disk.
- The old versions were in the same place as the latest version, and if you wanted to delete a file, you'd just say "delete blah.blah.*" to wipe out all versions (and therefore all traces of the file)... then say "oops!"
It was useful in many cases, but in a different way from CVS. A very useful solution would be to have file-level journaling with the ability to throw in comments and create tags and branches.
I have a script that does all of this for me:
http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/soft/filemonitor
You point it at a dir and run it from cron nightly. It also gives you a handy nightly mail telling you what changed. Excellent for those late night changes to systems where you don't remember what you did...or if someone else made some late night changes that you'd like to undo.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
This isn't insightful. He specifically states in the article that he has a .hide directory that _doesn't_ get "sown like seeds across a number of systems" just for this very reason.
Bah.
I'm not sure why something that I wrote in 2001 and that appeared in print media in 2002 is news.
This is the second time I've been slashdotted for something over 1 year old this year. Previously it was the pkg-comp page, which I wrote circa 1998.
Kinda makes you wonder.
Anyway..
I suppose I should mention that these days I keep most of my home directory in subversion. I have not gotten around to writing a successor to this article yet, but it works even better than cvs, and that's probably the most common question people ask me about this article these days.
see shy jo
Or you can just use Gentoo, which does this automatically when you update your system, pointing out the location and files that are different, all with diff output, and the ability to merge the changes, overwrite or ignore the change.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
This was featured in a Linux Journal article from September 2002:
http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976
Same guy, too.
Where do you think Gentoo got this from?
Debian.