On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 18:08 -0700, John Stile wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 23:24 -0700, Jeff D wrote:
> > On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, John Stile wrote:
> >
> > > Can I get any advice or links regarding checking in an entire / of a
> > > Linux system?
> > >
> > > Are there any pitfalls?
> > >
> > > To deploy a new system, could i simply do a svn checkout onto an empty
> > > file system?
> > >
> > > I use gentoo, and when I do an update sometimes things stop working, but
> > > I need to be able to get back to what did work, and track what did
> > > change on an global system level. Just backing up config files doesn't
> > > help me version control the entire system.
> > >
> >
> > You would probably be better off using some imaging software like g4l or
> > systemimager or even just a good rsync. Going the svn would be fairly
> > messy and difficult to maintain , especially with permissions.
> >
> I have been using systemimager to take snapshots, along with making
> copies of the images, which makes a sort-of version control system, but
> I've got burned too many times to continue doing it that way. I almost
> lost 4 moths of work due to bad luck, and svn could have saved me.
>
> Maybe some marriage between subversion with systemimager might make
> things manageable. If I do an svn export to the systemimager image
> directory, I could push updates && install to target system. But I need
> at least one hard drive that is a real svn checkout, with .svn
> directories all over the place. I'm still thinking it over, but thank
> you everyone, for adding your ideas.
>
Update on my quest for The Holy Grail.
I ran into some immediate problems with version-ing the entire system.
1. Subversion does not take UNIX pipes! I have read many posts (as far
back as version 1.1.4), and in 2.3.2 pipes still aren't supported. Will
they ever be? Though it is useful for a small number of people, should
subversion set a policy about what type of files can be checked in?
2. Subversion does not keep track of ownership or permissions. This
seems like a killer. I'll need a script that can record all ownership
and permissions on every file before check in. I will also need a
script to read this meta data and fix all the ownership and permissions
after the checkout. This seems like a very big harry task. No?
3. Some files can't be converted to UTF8. I don't really know why svn
wants to convert my source files, but this stops the import cold. I
haven't found the solution for this yet, but I'm still looking.
If there are more pitfalls, please let me know. I'm discovering a few,
but I'm sure I haven't touched on all the issues yet.
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Received on Fri Apr 13 04:07:24 2007