CVS as a filesystem

As I mentioned in my Bad, Mozilla. Bad! entry, I have several computers and operating systems I use daily. Besides just keeping bookmarks up to date, over the years I've found that there other critical files that I need to keep synchronized in all environments. For example, many of the "dot" files (.bashrc, .bash_profile, etc.) are pretty essential to keep me sane in every environment. I found a pretty clever way to keep these files all up to date. I use CVS! For files like this which don't change very often, its a great hack to use CVS as a quasi-distributed filesystem. And what's even better is all the files are versioned. And fairly straight forward. I put a CVS server on a machine that all the other machines can access, and create a project to check all my essential files into. It doesn't have any firewall barriers that aren't insurmountable, if I use runsocks for example. And I can even securely transfer files by using either ssh or stunnel. Currently I have all my "shell" files, I have many common images and icons I use for GNOME launchers, I have X11 client app-defaults files, and common scripts and executables, all in a single project. I've even put together a fairly elaborate way of maintaining machine and operating system specific configs for shell environments that get automatically loaded for the appropriate system. Its worked quite well for me for the last several years.

(2004-09-28 15:26:35.0) Comments [2] // Permalink