Re: backups with git and inotify

["Björn Steinbrink" <B.Steinbrink@gmx.de>]

On 2007.12.10 20:29:11 +0000, Luciano Rocha wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> The following is a work in progress. There are some problems in how I'm
> using git and recording the history:
> 
> 1. I use an opened fd for each monitored directory (and subdirectories),
>    (inotify_add_watch_at would be nice).
>    I fchdir(fd) when a change happens to register and commit it.
> 
> 2. git-rm dir/file also removes <dir> if file was the only entry of
>    <dir>. So, when committing the removal, git complains that it can't
>    find cwd. So I record the parent directory, do the git command, check
>    if getcwd() works, and if not do the commit in the parent directory.
> 
> 3. git-rm (empty) directory fails
> 
> 4. Changes aren't atomic, but I can live with that and I doubt I would
>    be able to make it atomic without implementing a filesystem (FUSE or
>    not).
> 
> I can work around most of the problems, and rewrite to use recorded path
> names instead of directories fd, but before I do that, and while I'm
> at the beginning, I'd like to probe for opinions and suggestions.
> 
> So, please, suggest.

I posted an extremely simple bash script here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/12/7/279

It just employs inotifywait to do all watching and just needs to
translate the events to the different git command. Did just glance over
your code, but it seems to do basically the same thing, just that it's a
lot shorter. The overhead of being a shell script is probably neglible,
as the amount of git calls are likely dominating anyway.

Feel free to ignore my comments on why I think that that is crap anyway
and do whatever you want with the script.

HTH
Björn