Comments on: Finally putting my personal configuration files under version control

By: pille

pille — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:45:35 +0000

managing multiple repositories is the only scenario for such a script.

i’ve rewritten this tool to support this feature.
it can be found along with an explanation at http://struction.de/projects/dotVC

until my need for that feature using the suggested .htignore hack worked fine.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:42:31 +0000

A valid argument for the symlinking-approach: you can easily opt-out if you want to use a differing config file on some host for some odd reason, so you don’t have to worry about unintentionally updating some file if you don’t want to.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:33:00 +0000

Good point, I haven’t thought of that. But the symlinking-approach still has some potential advantages: it’s immediately apparent what files are under VC; I can have several repositories, e.g. a repository that I want to make public, and one for private data. Fortunately, emacs sees that the symlinks lead to version controlled files, so this is only mildly inconvenient. But still, good point.

By: Giorgos Keramidas

Giorgos Keramidas — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:21:14 +0000

Ignore files help a lot when you want to avoid crawling huge and largely irrelevant subdirectories of $HOME.

My first commit at $HOME/.hg/ about a year ago was:

$ hg log -r0
changeset: 0:51a27c91da6a
user: Giorgos Keramidas
date: Sun Feb 10 22:34:41 2008 +0200
summary: Initial revision: ignore everything by default in $HOME dirs.

This was just an .hgignore file that ignores ‘**’, the pattern that matches any file in any subdirectory.

Then I “hg add”-ed only the files that I want to track. A short script that prints pairs of {rev, number of files} pairs shows that I have been slowly increasing the number of tracked files since last year. I started with only one file (the .hgignore file) and have reached 400 files now:

$ hg log –template ‘{rev}\n’ -r 0:tip | \
while read rev ; do \
echo “${rev}” $(hg manifest “${rev}” | \
wc -l | awk ‘{print $1}’) ; \
done | \
awk ‘BEGIN {ofiles=0;}
{ if ($2 != ofiles) {
printf ” {%d %d},”, $1, $2;
ofiles=$2;
fflush();
}
}’
=> {0 1}, {1 2}, {2 8}, … {497 399}, {500 400},

Running “hg stat” is almost instantaneous, even though my entire $HOME is quite a few GB now:

$ time hg stat
M .newsrc
M .newsrc.eld

real 0m0.796s
user 0m0.407s
sys 0m0.381s
$

This is for a different version control system, but my intuition says not traversing ignored subdirs should be ‘fixable’ in other VCSs too.