Re: Git Questions

From: Matthieu Moy <matthieu.moy@imag.fr>
Date: Aug 20, 2007, 12:53 UTC
Message-ID: <vpqlkc6nz8c.fsf@bauges.imag.fr>
In-Reply-To: <1187612156.11595.17.camel@tom-desktop>

Tom Schinckel <gunny01@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> The reason I want to do that is so I can set up blind commits that I can
> add in a anacron job or something. The information about the files isn't
> really important
>
> Thanks for the help: I'm using git in a uncoventional way.

OK. AAUI, you're abusing git as a backup system.

That's definitely not what git (and other VCS) is meant for. What git is good at is to create clean "changesets" (i.e. _you_ tell git when you have something worth recording in history), and merging. But since git is fast and disk-efficient (if you run git-gc from time to time), it can probably be a good backup tool too.

If you want to run "git commit" each time you save a file, you can probably program your editor to do so, or use something like fam/inotify. But it's probably not reasonable, you'll quickly end-up with thousands of file revisions (imagine the result if you run a script like "for i in $(whatever big thing); do echo $i >> file; done"). If I were you, I'd set up a cron job to do the commit once every (few) minute(s). If the project is not too big, it will take less than a second, and commit will fail silently if you have no modification to commit.

You'll want git to automatically add any new file, so you'll run something like

git add .

# Remove deleted files. # There's probably a better way, but I don't find it. git-ls-files --deleted -z | git-update-index --remove -z --stdin

git commit -m backup

I don't think your idea of taking the output of git-status as a commit message is necessarily relevant: this information is anyway in the commit, git-show and friends will show it. I'd say the commit message is irrelevant, and you can provide a dummy one. Otherwise, someone answered in the thread.

-- 
Matthieu