On Sat, 17 Apr 2010, Miguel Ramos wrote:
2010/4/17 <david@xxxxxxx>:
On Sat, 17 Apr 2010, Miguel Ramos wrote:
Well, David, you certainly made a good case defending using a VCS for
filesystems.
However, a versioned filesystem should be more adequate for that.
a versioned filesystem will not let you easily clone or backup your system.
a versioned filesystem could be a nice UI to access a DVCS that would give
you this sort of ability
Why would one want diffs, patches, branches, merges for the entire
filesystem?
these all seem like very useful things to me
diffs to find out what changed when a system gets broken, or after something
new is installed.
patches could be a way to either install software, or to propogate updates
between systems.
branches could easily be different systems
merges are for when you have two systems each doing one job and you want to
combine them onto one piece of hardware (could could do it with
virtualization, if you are willing to pay the overhead). you wouldn't want
to merge the binary files, but you would want to merge the branches that
contain binary files.
there are many reasons why you don't just use your linux distro tools to
manage large numbers of machines and configurations.
David Lang
Yes, you certainly are right.
It does open up a set of new possibilities.
Even better if it was based on a binary diff, because otherwise you
either had to be very conservative updating software or run out of
space.
git works just fine on doing diffs of binary files.
shallow clones on individual systems would avoid the need to have
huge amounts of storage on an individual system for history, and with a
separate branch for each system you only have to have the files for your
system locally, but on systems where you keep all the branches disk space
is usually not that big a problem.
David Lang
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