On 31/01/2013 9:13 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
On Jan 31, 2013, at 20:05, Jason Keltz wrote:
On 31/01/2013 6:06 PM, Bob Archer wrote:
What you need to do could work. I assume this "software" in order to run can
build built or whatever during your nightly update on each client?
You keep saying "rsyncing" ... you wouldn't use that. You wouldn't use that of
course, you would use the svn client binary.
Actually, maybe I wasn't clear..
The software includes various packages like say, Matlab, or Maple, or whatever else, already installed...
imagine a directory on the fileserver.. say, /local/software which includes "bin", "lib",
etc... I'm not "installing" the software. it's already been installed.. I'm just syncing a
directory between machines..
As for rsyncing.. I would rsync the software from the "file server" to the "software
distribution" server, and then use svn from there to check in all the changes.
For you initial load... if the software is on the server where you will house
your repository you can just import the data into the repository from that
file... there is no need to send the data twice. In other words, you can have
both a working copy and a repository on your central server.
Yes. Initially I would do an import, but the problem is... the next day, the software gets updated
on the "real" file server... say, new version of Matlab or something... in the evening,
I want the process to run that would rsync the data (with all the changes) from the file server to
the software distribution server, do something to commit the changes, then the 100 clients would
eventually each "svn update". However, to be able to commit the changes, I need to
have a working copy on the software distribution server....
However, after the rsync happens, I now need to run a command that would
update the repository with the state of the working directory. However, it's
not
exactly clear how this would work? Running an "svn update"
"svn update" brings any changes in the repository to your working copy. "svn
commit" does the opposite... it puts any changes in a working directory into the repository.
See, this is where I'm confused... I created a few directories including "bin" and
"pkg" for a test. All committed fine... erased them from the working copy, did a commit
then a status and I see:
! bin
! pkg
but when I go into a different directory and check out the current state..
A pkg
A bin
Checked out revision 2.
they're still there...
Correct. Subversion does not track your movements. You must tell Subversion what you are moving and
deleting by doing the moves and deletes using "svn mv" and "svn rm", not using
regular OS commands.
Hth...
That said, if this is actual software, wouldn't using one of the many package
management tools available in Linux be a better fit?
The thing is, I'm moving around already installed software, and there's nothing that
great, as far as I can see, for doing that. The twitter guys are using something they
wrote called "murder" which uses torrent to do this kind of thing... excellent
idea, but it uses Ruby and several other tools ... and I don't want to get into that at
the moment...
Subversion is not going to be a satisfactory solution for this use case. Besides all the
issues you're describing with setting up the server-side infrastructure for this, and as
was already mentioned, when you check out a working copy of this on your clients, there
will be a "duplicate" pristine copy of everything. So if you have 60GB of
software, it'll take up 120GB of space on the client machine.
I'm glad you brought that up :)
Subversion is not a software distribution tool; it is a document and revision
management system. Use a different tool. As someone else said, rsync seems like
a good tool for this job; I didn't understand why you think using rsync
directly between your file server and your clients won't work.
See my email to Les... If only the rsync server could save a copy of
the file checksums when it runs, it would probably decrease the sync
time by half and save a whole lot of disk activity...
--
Jason Keltz
Manager of Development
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
York University, Toronto, Canada
Tel: 416-736-2100 x. 33570
Fax: 416-736-5872
