[plug] Desktop linux question...

[James Devenish]

In message <BAY14-DAV44HIv6Eybq0000a000 at hotmail.com>
on Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 02:54:12PM +0800, senectus wrote:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/11/237250&mode=flat

(An article about putting your home directory into CVS.)

> Would running diff distro's make that hard??

Mixing distos should have no impact on CVS whatsoever. *However*, I
would suggest that it's not a good idea unless you know who need the
functionality of CVS. (I haven't read the follow-up on Slashdot,
though.) I would suggest that you use Unison for this purpose. A short
list of my own reasoning:

 - CVS requires a 'repository'. The repository contains all revisions of
   your home directory, meaning you can 'rewind' to a past version. This
   might sound good, but CVS is not really capable of handling deletions
   and moves nicely (not to mention some quirks with binary files), so
   it may be considered unsuitable for home directories. Also, all
   distribution of changes needs to happen via the repository, which
   means that moving files from A to B is a three-step process: update
   A, commit A, update B. Also, your storage requirements increase from
   "number of computers * size of home dir" to "number of computers *
   size of home dir + accumulated size of all files that have ever
   existed in your home directory".
 - Unison is specifically designed to do what I assume it is that you
   want to do.

For the record, I use Unison for synchronising my general directories
and CVS for my "dot files".