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."

Comments

Why just home?

[AuMatar]

I asked this on a local linux mailing group recently- what do people think about the idea of a version control file system? Disk space is cheap these days, we can afford it space wise. Think of all the problems it would solve.

*Made a mistake in your config file? Revert it
*User deleted the file? Revert it
*Want to see why you made a change to any given file? Check the comments (commenting would be optional, of course)
*Your system was exploited? Revert the entire system to before the exploit
*Upgraded an app and regret it? Revert the files

And so on. I'm not sure if CVS would be the best method (I'm not a SCM specialist), but I'd see this as an extremely useful feature who's time has come.

How does he handle renaming and erasing in CVS?

[Anonymous Coward]

'cause CVS loses the history in these operations.

Re:How does he handle renaming and erasing in CVS?

[neonleonb]

Alias mv to execute some shell script:
mv $1 $2
cvs remove $1
cvs add $2
cvs commit -m "move $1 $2" $1 $2
You might want to add some script to deal with the case where $2 is a directory, but that shouldn't be too hard.

That way, information about the move and the previous file status is kept.

Been doing that a *long* time

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been keeping my home directory in CVS since 1996. Prior to that, I kept it in RCS, since around 1985, and briefly in SCCS.

I haven't yet decided to go to Subversion, in part because I have a patched version of CVS that allows me to check into multiple CVS repositories - i.e. I can check in when on my laptop on an airplane, disconnected from the net, and can later check in to my main repository when I get connected. (Yeah, yeah, BitKeeper is a way to do that.)

As Joey's article discusses, there are minor issues with CVS'ing your home directory: use of modules, etc. I divide it into stuff that is owned by the company that I am currently working for, and stuff that I own.

When I get an account on a new machine, one of the first things that I do is create a new branch (or, a new version on some existing branch) to hold the dot files and other files
that were pre-installed in my home directory. Having saved them, I then blithely overwrite them with my standard home directory, and maybe do a quick check to see if there are any special features worth propagating to my standard home directory.

Oh, yeah: a bit of footwork to checkout
onto your home directory:

cd ~
mv * .* /tmp/glew/old-home-directory // actually, usually saved already
cvs -d MYSERVER co glew-home
mv glew-home/{*,.*} .
rmdir glew-home

I often find myself pasting together
modules from different repositories.
Sometimes I *want* a "cvs update"
in the root, e.g. in ~, to traverse
repository boundaries - no problem.
But sometimes I don't - e.g. I frequently
work in ~/hack, and check out stuff into there.

To do this, I have fallen into the habit
of creating a CVSBARRIER directory that is
not checked in, that prevents cvs update
from traversing.

Also, I find it useful to have a place
to put overall comments for a repository.
Typically, this is ~/README or ~/CVS-status.
The overall comments - such as "the tag
named FOO is my home directory at the time
I moved to university BAR and merged in
changes from my laptop BAZZ that had diverged"
get suck in the CVS log, via
cvs ci -f CVS-status.

Oner thing: when yiou have as much history as this, you notice when programs change their interface. E.g. nmh doesn't run my ~/.mhrc from 1994 :-(

--- Andy "Krazy" Glew
(I'm too lazy to create a slashdot account)