[ltp] intermezzo?

[Tod Harter]

On Tuesday 17 February 2004 5:33 pm, Benjamin Weste Pearre wrote:
> I missed the beginning of this thread, so please ignore this as
> appropriate, but have you looked at unison?  Whereas rsync is a
> master/slave kind of thing, and is therefore good for backups and
> other read-only stuff, unison is meant to let you edit files on all
> computers.
>
No, though the write up on it sounds like it would be a pretty good tool.

Remember, ALL of these tools have the same limitation, conflicting updates 
still have to be resolved by a human being. Thats not so bad for certain 
types of files with easy semantics, like source code, but how do you resolve 
a conflicted update in a binary file? You would need a tool that understood 
the semantics of that particular file format (maybe one day we can imagine an 
XML mechanism for doing this with arbitrary data, but thats far in the 
future...). This is one of the big reasons revision control systems have 
historically been limited to software development projects.

For that matter if you don't mind a little complexity something like 
subversion can be a really nice way to do this sort of thing. You can 
construct a repository, which is just a fancy WebDAV enabled Apache document 
tree, and each client can maintain its copy of the files as a working copy. 
Its even possible now with the latest versions to support direct read/write 
access to the master repository from vanilla WebDAV clients like Office. The 
latest patches will actually let a program like Office update a document in 
the repository and it will be handled just like a commit from an updated 
working copy (within limits). 

I've used this kind of system extensively, as do many sysadmins I know, to 
manage *nix servers. Just version control /etc and it will save you a LOT of 
headaches! Want to reconstruct a downed server? Build a new one and export a 
working copy of /etc! Update goofed your system? svn revert is your friend.  
The only real penalty is you will always have at least 1 extra copy of your 
files (in the repository) which is fine unless they are really big... 

> --
> Ben Pearre          http://hebb.mit.edu/~ben       PGP: CFDA6CDA
> Don't let Bush read your email!             http://www.gnupg.org

-- 
Tod Harter
Giant Electronic Brain
http://www.giantelectronicbrain.com