Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
On Aug 17, 2007, at 2:36 PM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Mercurial is easy enough that for the first time since RCS, the
entire OS on my computer is now under source control.
Now, when Apple pushes out some crappy "Software Update", I can see
exactly what they're fiddling with and decide to accept or reject.
Okay, now this got my attention.
Well, the thing that got this all started was VMWare. After installing
VMWare Fusion Beta, my system was exhibiting some strange instabilities.
Of course, VMWare demands a root password. Unusually, in this case,
VMWare actually needs it. It uses some kernel extensions to hook into
networking and device interception. However, I wanted to know that when
VMWare says it uninstalled everything, it really uninstalled *everything*.
Without a VCS, I couldn't tell. Now I can. And they didn't. They left
a kernel extension laying around that seems to have been the culprit.
They fixed the problem in a later Beta, but at least I knew.
Having everything under VCS also lets me relax my "no root password"
policy a bit. I can do an install of some software, check it out, and
be *sure* as to whether it's uninstall did the right thing or not. And,
if not, I can force the revert.
Does OS X not have packages like Debian or Fedora? Since VMware is
mostly made up of binary files, does this mean you store entire binaries
when differences arise (not that big a deal since disk is cheap)?
How would this work for a system that is under package management and
you have to revert the database that goes along with the packages?
I'm not sure I would see the need for this if a system has LVM and you
can just take snapshots and then revert if something doesn't work right.
Gus
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
