Re: A system administration use case for git

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 22, 2009, 10:07 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90904220307h2ac16881qe29c77c5a0334160@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <2cfc40320904220222ub9b95f8o35afcddb0390fe1b@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com> wrote:

> One disadvantage of that approach is if the file system is very large
> and only has a few deltas, then I effectively have to have two copies
> of the reference file system - one in the GIT repo and one that I can

You could minimise the on-disk footprint -- and protect it from concurrent access (concurrent change) by using a hardlinked tree on the destination side. rsync knows to break hardlinks, etc.

Currently, you can't "rsync into git" which would save you that step. It's a ton of work to do that -- if anyone is planning on working on something like that, perhaps writing directly into the fast-import protocol is a good shortcut.

I'd like to have something like that for my OLPC School Server, which could benefit from using git as the backup backend -- it currently uses hardlinked directories.

> In an ideal world, storage requirements at the other place would be
> those of the reference file system + those of the various deltas, but
> no more.

rsync + hardlinked trees + git gets you quite close to that.

cheers,

-- 
 martin.langhoff@gmail.com
 martin@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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