On Sat, 17 Apr 2010, Gabriel Filion wrote:
On 2010-04-16 16:44, Miguel Ramos wrote:
Hi,
Is it possible with git to use a git repository on the root directory?
I'm trying to replace subversion doing this.
I used this method before to get my home directory versioned with
success, so far.
Although I'll give comments on the rest, is it really relvant to put all
of the filesystem into a version control system? From a system
administrator's point of view, backing up is more about keeping copies
of what's important in the computer than about versioning every tiny
change in the file system.
every tiny change in the filesystem could be important. it takes a lot of
time to examine every package your distro creates to be sure that you know
what files in it are important and what ones aren't.
In addition, if you need the ability to recreate a system later
(potentially years later, after the distro mirrors have stopped carrying
that version), even the binaries can be important.
One example of something that is weird to backup is /var . It contains
data that will almost certainly always change.
that's what .gitignore is for
A simpler thing to do if you'd like to be able to reinstall a computer
real quick would be to make an image of the computer (call it a ghost, a
dd of all the disk or whatever) and to establish a backup only for the
sensible data (say, for an LDAP server, you would backup ldap's ldiff
files and configuration). Then, restoring from a crash would just mean
to reinstall with the image of the disk and to restore the latest backup.
if you do this you run the risk of missing some critical file from your
backup
your approach is 'back up only what I know I need to', using git and
.gitignore it becomes 'back up everything except what I know I don't want
to' (and there is a surprising amount of stuff in /var that you may need
to backup)
if you have one very standard image then you may have a really good image
to use, but if you want more variety in your systems the git approach
gives you automatic deduplication of your backed up data, as well as very
efficient delta compression between similar files on different systems.
the ease in maintaining replicas of the data is just another bonus.
it may not suit your environment, but there are some very attractive
features here. Compare this to any backup software and (except for git not
storing permissions) you will find that the feature sets look very
similar. After all, in both cases you are archiving data so that you can
go back in history as needed so it's substantially the same problem
David Lang
When I'm on the root directory, things seem to work minimally. I do
git status, etc, and get the expected results.
However, if I change say to /etc, or any other directory, for that
matter, then git status tells me that every file in the repository is
deleted.
Adding files doesn't work, nothing works at all.
This sounds like an issue with finding the actual .git directory when
you are in /etc. is this directory under a different partition than / ?
I have a populated repository elsewhere, I can clone this to an empty
directory and then move .git to / to work around the demand that the
target directory is empty and at the same time avoid overwriting
files.
so, you're cloning to some temp dir, then moving temp/.git to / and then
using something like git checkout HEAD some/file/somewhere ?
I know this is an unforeseen use of git, however, unforeseen might not
imply forbidden.
I'm pretty disappointed I couldn't get it working.
So the motivation for this posting is twofold:
- Is this possible in some other way, or did I do something wrong (I'm
new to git) ?
Check out the bup project[1], it uses the packfile format from git to
compress data but its focus is more on keeping versions of arbitrary
data rather than code files. it's still very new and lacks some
important features but it sure is promising.
[1] : http://github.com/apenwarr/bup
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