Re: A system administration use case for git

[Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Jon Seymour <jon.seymour@gmail.com> wrote:
> One disadvantage of that approach is if the file system is very large
> and only has a few deltas, then I effectively have to have two copies
> of the reference file system - one in the GIT repo and one that I can

You could minimise the on-disk footprint -- and protect it from
concurrent access (concurrent change) by using a hardlinked tree on
the destination side. rsync knows to break hardlinks, etc.

Currently, you can't "rsync into git" which would save you that step.
It's a ton of work to do that -- if anyone is planning on working on
something like that, perhaps writing directly into the fast-import
protocol is a good shortcut.

I'd like to have something like that for my OLPC School Server, which
could benefit from using git as the backup backend -- it currently
uses hardlinked directories.

> In an ideal world, storage requirements at the other place would be
> those of the reference file system + those of the various deltas, but
> no more.

rsync + hardlinked trees + git gets you quite close to that.

cheers,



m
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