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Anyone keeping /home in version control?

  • 27-02-2008 9:14pm
    #1
    sobriquet
    Closed Accounts Posts: 413 ✭✭


    I've been thinking for a while of doing this though not done anything with it yet, so just thinking out loud.

    I know it's been done with CVS and SVN, but I've been using Bazaar for pet projects in ~/src and it seems to me that DVCSeses are a perfect match. Keep /home in git (or whatever), and then doing backups is a matter of doing a periodical pull from the tree. I don't own a laptop, but the idea of using git to do a pull from the desktop before going on the road (and then pushing the updates back into the desktop upon return) seems like it'd be worthwhile.

    Nothing that couldn't be done with svn, but a DVCS would negate the need to keep a running server and duplicating it on, say, a laptop to pull/merge properly.

    Anyone doing something like this? I'd love to hear about it.


Comments

  • #2
    mick.fr
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,974 ✭✭✭mick.fr


    Wouldn't be easier to use a backup system or Tar to do that?


  • #3
    sobriquet
    Closed Accounts Posts: 413 ✭✭sobriquet


    mick.fr wrote: »
    Wouldn't be easier to use a backup system or Tar to do that?

    What you get from tar or rsync isn't quite what I'm talking about. Using a VCS gives you version control over your entire /home (see here for a good description of it), and my point is that using a Distributed VCS gives you easy backup and replication/merge for free, and the backups themselves contain full revisions for restoring at a given point.


  • #4
    Red Alert
    Hosted Moderators Posts: 7,486 ✭✭✭Red Alert


    I wouldn't advise doing it. For a start a lot of the .pref files in your home directory do need to be different on different machines.

    You are better off identifying large bodies of work and putting the top-level folder under version control. For example I keep all my research code and documents in one.


  • #5
    sobriquet
    Closed Accounts Posts: 413 ✭✭sobriquet


    Red Alert wrote: »
    For a start a lot of the .pref files in your home directory do need to be different on different machines.
    Not a big problem, Git, and I imagine all the mainstream VCSs have ignore files for just that.
    Red Alert wrote: »
    You are better off identifying large bodies of work and putting the top-level folder under version control. For example I keep all my research code and documents in one.
    Yeah, I'm already doing that, though not in a single dir.

    For anyone interested, here's a tool intended for exactly what I'm talking about, and here's a mailing list and wiki for people doing it.

    Does no-one else see the attraction? I thought the wins for pretty obvious. I wouldn't work on code without a VCS, I don't see why that principle shouldn't apply to pretty much everything.


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