Wil Perhaps you should not be using subversion or cvs for the task. Maybe something more like dervish with code added to delete older revisions.
- Bill Morita wamorita At hevanet.com -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 7:35 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [PLUG] Anyone know of "lossy" version-control software? I am looking for something that, as far as I have been able to find, does not exist. I want a version-control package that intentionally and programmatically destroys revisions. Before I explain further, let me provide some background use-cases. We maintain a lot of data automatically and usually do a plain-text dump for back up and in some cases we stuff these dumps into Subversion, primarily for ease of roll-back in case something should break. For example, we have LDIF dumps of our LDAP tree; text dumps of our Cyrus IMAP mailbox list; generated /etc/group files that are stored and distributed via Subversion, etc. At other times, when I was subject to Windows DNS admins, I stored periodic snapshots of DNS zones with RCS. The problem with keeping this data in a traditional VCS like Subversion is that I don't actually need all of those revisions. I really need hourly dumps for the last few days for roll-back purposes. It is sometimes nice to have a daily or weekly dump to use for data-mining purposes, to answer questions like, "When did we start setting this attribute like this?" or "At what rate has our mailbox list grown?" Having snapshots every 5 minutes for a couple hours wouldn't be bad either, but it's not really feasible if they exist forever. If you think of the way rrdtool maintains numerical time-series data, then the idea should seem pretty familiar. So what I want is some sort of archival or version-control software that can be configured for the programmed destruction of old versions and keeping selected samples. Back-up software sort of does this and many packages will backup to a file, but it seems like overkill to have to setup and configure Bacula or Amanda just to manage a handful of files. Part of the problem is that I just don't know what to call something like this. "Round-robin archive" sounds good, but that's what rrdtool calls its archive files. "Rolling-archive" also sounds right, but from what I can tell that's a feature of the K2 WordPress UI theme. "Lossy VCS" or "lossy SCM" leads only to snide comments about VisualSourceSafe. I have used CVS and Subversion enough to know that getting them to throw away revisions is painful. I've been using Git a lot lately and it likewise seems unwilling to get rid of stuff. There are a lot of other ones, like Arch, Darcs, Bazaar, Mercurial, etc., that I know little to nothing of, but what I am asking for is something they are fundamentally designed to not do. I've been wondering about something built on top of the Git plumbing-layer, but do not have enough of a grasp of it to know if it is possible. Any ideas? Wil _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
