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Re: Noninvasive administrative areas (.svn)

From: Holger Krekel <pyth_at_devel.trillke.net>
Date: 2003-12-02 15:07:58 CET

Stuart Clayton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I nearly fell out of my pants when I read about the Subversion project on
> the apache site. An alternative to CVS!!! I thought, they've surely
> corrected that one big CVS annoyance, namely that administrative areas
> (.cvs) are bang in the same physical directory structure as the working
> copies, as "parallel directories".

Actually Jens-Uwe Mager and me are working on a utility/concept named
'vadm' to provide non-intrusive versioning of arbitrary files and directories
- including permissions and ownership (captured in a specific vadm:posix
svn-property). Basically we have a bidirectional mapping between "versioning
targets" beeing anywhere on the filesystem to a user specific WorkingCopy
thus they are separated and you can version single files etc.pp.
Needless to say, we are using subversion under the hood :-)

Currently, we are targeting 'vadm' only at system-configuration: we want
to track all manually-configured configuration files and some
directories throughout the whole file system (including e.g.
/etc/passwd, our svn-commit hooks, postfix and apache-configuration
files and some /usr/local/bin scripts). Of course, the user-WCs of
multiple administrators get out of sync as soon as one admin commits
changes, but we have a solid and transparent solution for this (they
all *share* one SVN-url which represents the "live" local file system.
It's thus safe to revert&update to this shared URL and then transfer
the system files to the WC, mapping owner/perm to vadm:posix properties).

After we scratched this itch i think it's easy to extend the scheme to
provide more general non-intrusive versioning. We are mirroring most
of the svn-commands to 'vadm', anyway :-)

cheers,

    holger

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Received on Tue Dec 2 15:06:28 2003

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