On 12/2/06, Woodchuck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, 2 Dec 2006, Nick Guenther wrote: > > > On 12/2/06, Vim Visual <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hola, cariño: > > > > > > I was even thinking of using subversion to "live" in a repository and > > > svn add and commit from time to time... but then paranoia knocked > > > > > > > Why couldn't you set up a a vnd on the usb disk, and a svn on the vnd? > > This would be slow in speed, but it would allow you to only have to > > backup diffs which would save you much more time. > > > > -Nick > > the speed problem is going to be in decrypting large > files from the vnd to calculate diffs Well that's what timestamps are for! You only need to diff files that differ in their timestamps, and decompressing the parts of the vnd that contain the timestamps is much less taxing than decompressing the entire files. How do you think cvs works? By comparing every file every time?
> Also, we don't know the internal structure > of these files, and how they change. Rewritten? 10 random bytes > changeing in a 1G file? SQL stuff? Better not to know or guess. Why is this relevant? > The advantage > I see to rdist is that it results in a mirror of various directory > trees on the USB disk, making any manual inspection or restoration > "self-documenting". Doesn't cvs do this too? > Yet the idea of storing diffs of some kind is > very enticing, especially if they could be computed on the fly, > stored on the "master" (the laptop's main disk[s]) and saved to > "slave" (the USB) batch-wise. This sounds like there's lots of room for breakage. So to restore you have to apply each and every diff to each file one after the other? And how would they be computed on the fly? Some sort of kernel hook that notices whenever a file is accessed? > My long-winded posts are serving to educate first me and then Vim > (and anybody else who is interested, including Mr Google and Mr > Archives) about "what is a filesystem", "what is a [s]vnd" and "what > is rdist". A very good mindset! Wait, Openbsd-newbies has archives? > Maybe I've missed something here. Maybe all the diff calculating > would be done on plaintext files on the "master"? There's a design > point here: the whole data collection has to be reconstructable if > the laptop is crushed by a bus. So "version 0.0.0" of the data has > to be on the USB. But that's no penalty, really, just a one-time > event. [thinking out loud here]. I need to look at subversion. > Can you "advocate" it over rcs/cvs? In a way it's all same-same. No I can't. Subversion is the successor to CVS though (I can say that with impunity because several of the original cvs developers are on svn) so without looking at anything else, presumably it's better. > Another design-point -- the data collection has to be present and > usable regardless of the USB, i.e. the "repository" has to reside > on the laptop; the repository would have to be mirrored to the USB. > Maybe subversion has an efficient repository mirroring feature. Right. I don't have a solution for this problem yet. I also don't know enough about these tools to say. > make'ing fetch of subversion now .... yikes, it's huge and it smells > like it wants python, and it might install a half-dozen libraries > of its own. My idea of a system utility is something that lives > in /usr/bin and takes up about 55KB of disk. Like rdist ;-) > (Source code of rdist and rdistd tar to a .tgz of 76KB -- subversion > is around 6000KB for the source.tgz). Ick! It probably wants python for SCons (to avoid fighting with make). But I don't know about the rest. -Nick _______________________________________________ Openbsd-newbies mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.theapt.org/listinfo/openbsd-newbies
