.bashrc in the cloud? - bash

I do alot of development from the terminal at both work and home. What's a good solution for keeping all of my .bashrc, .vimrc, .screenrc, Irssi configs and scripts, etc. in sync across multiple machines?
I was thinking of setting up a hook in my .bash_login to go into a ssh into a central repository and rsync everything, but is there a better way?

One solution I have seen used by a number of my friends is to put all of their configuration files in a source control repository like Github which can use your home direcoory as their working directory.
Then all you need to do is pull from the repository and all of your rc files will be up to date. Committing changes from any of your machines and pushing them allows you to make those changes available everywhere.
In order to deal with variation among versions or paths between machines you can either use multiple branches(or tags depending on your choice of revision control) or just use the building in condition abilities of your config files (at those which support such things).

Put your config files in your Dropbox folder, and symlink to them in your homedir.

Related

How do I stop OneDrive from downloading git.exe on Windows?

I have used Git on Windows for a while, but recently changed the setting and got this.
On almost every command for Git Bash (also on PowerShell and Github Desktop) I get
git.exe is being downloaded on OneDrive
(translation may not be exactly the same)
The setting that changed recently is moving my repos to a OneDrive folder in order to have them synced between two sessions: that is work desktop and remote virtual machine.
I can see that this may not be ideal, but it really works for me since I have the same settings on both sessions, and not really get used to doing many commit-push-pull. Not the main topic here, but feel free to comment.
(Edit): Upon reading solution, there are other ways to set this syncing that doesn't mess up with the internals of Git. Look for that instead. Thanks.
In any case, the strange thing is that the notifications happen only on the Remote Virtual Machine, but not on the desktop.
I have seen some notifications about some files in the repos, which I then attribute to OneDrive being nosy about every move I make file I move. But then I've also seen files I don't know about, and theres always git.exe attached to the notification.
In the first scenario I have tried tuning down the notifications for OneDrive. Some might say Microsoft does have a background for not letting users setup their notifications, so I'm still looking.
Thanks.
Most file syncing tools like OneDrive and Dropbox operate by syncing data file by file. This is a great approach if you're working on a single word-processing document or spreadsheet. However, it's not as great when you're working with a Git repository.
When changing between branches or making a commit, Git changes and creates a lot of files all at once. In order to be synced correctly, all of the created files must be written in a similar order: all the blobs must be written, then the trees, then the commits, and then the refs can be updated. If you do this out of order, your repository can be corrupted, since you can have branches that refer to objects that don't exist (or objects that refer to other objects that don't exist).
In addition, these tools can end up deleting files you wanted to have in your working tree or recreating files you didn't. So overall, you don't want to sync any Git repository using one of these tools.
You can write a bundle file with git bundle and sync that, or you can use rsync to sync a repository provided it's idle (not being modified) when you do. Note that if you sync a working tree, Git will need to refresh all files when you sync it across to the new machine, and also Git doesn't try to defend against untrusted users who have access to the working tree.
It's also not a good idea to sync your Git installation itself via OneDrive, which is what it sounds like might be happening. Instead, install Git for Windows on each machine independently and don't try to sync it across. OneDrive should have configuration options that let you control what's synced.

How to tackle machine-dependant configuration with SVN and VS2010?

To start with some background, I am a member of a small team developing an ASP.NET application. In addition to us, there are 2 other teams working on it, all from different countries. Source code is hosted on a shared SVN server but there is no central testing environment. Each developer runs the app on their own machine and data services are set up per team.
Unfortunately our SVN workflow has some gaps in it: annoyances arise when there is time for an SVN update.
It is mainly because each developer and team have slightly different environments in terms of disk directory structure and configuration (both IIS and app itself). Hence conflicts in configuration files and elsewhere that in essence are not conflicts at all - for runtime configuration (XML) and in *.suo.
How should we handle this if our objective is to keep checkout, app setup and update as painless as possible?
One option would obviously be master copies. Another one establishing uniformity in developer environments and keeping it. But what about a third alternative?
One thing to do is to not put the .suo files into SVN, there's no reason to do that.
For IIS configuration there should be no argument - uniform environment across the build team.
For app.config files and the like, I tend to keep them in a separate "cfg" directory in the root of the project and use pre-build events to copy in the relevant ones I need depending on the project and environment I'm working on.
You could have a separate build task to copy in user-specific config into your output directory. Add a new directory in your root project called "user.config or something, and leave it empty. Then configure your project build to check this for entries and copy them to the output directory. This is easy to do, and then each dev can have their own config without affecting the master copies. Just make sure you have an ignore pattern on that folder so you don't commit user-specific configuration. If you have svnadmin access to your source code repo, you could set a hook to prevent it from ever happening.
Also set ignore patterns on your root directory (recursively) for .suo, .user, _Resharper or any other extensions you think are pertinent. There are some So questions already on exactly this topic:
Best general SVN Ignore Pattern?
Ignore *.suo and *.user files in svn. It is easy. After that create two types of config files in subversion. Development and Server, if in use add Test also. See below example.
ConnectionStringDevelopment.config
ConnectionStringServer.config
AppSettingsDevelopment.config
AppSettingsServer.config
Server files would contain server information. Development files is not contained in svn and ignored there. Every new developer will start by copying server files and making changes according to his environment.
Look following example site
http://code.google.com/p/karkas/source/browse/trunk/Karkas.Ornek/WebSite/web.config
following lines are interest.
<appSettings configSource="appSettingsDevelopment.config"/>
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStringsDevelopment.config" />
ConfigSource can be used almost everywhere in web.config therefore you will be able to change every config to every developer. Only make use of following naming convention. ignore *Development.config in subversion. This way no developer config will be added to subversion.
Its not a perfect solution (and should only be used if there are not many of those special files), but what I do is to add fake files for each case, and switch the real file locally to it.
In detail: I have a file foo that creates the problem. I also create foo_1 and foo_2 and then locally switch foo to foo_1 (I use tortoisesvn, so I cant really give you the command line to do that). Then I am working on foo on my machine, but actually commit to foo_1. Other parties could then switch to foo_2...
(I admit this is basically a variant of the master-file approach you suggested yourself; but if there are not many actual changes to those files this at least reduces the numer of conflicts you have to think about)

Check in - Check out process/version control for PSDs and Image files

The title may not be so clear but the issue I am facing is this:
Are designers are working on large photoshop files across the network, this has a number of network traffic and file corruption issues which I am trying to overcome.
The way I want to do this is to have the designers copy the the files to their machine (Mac OSX) and work on them locally. But the problem then stands that they may forget to copy them back up or that another designer may start work on the version stored on the network.
What I need is a system where the designer checks out the files or folders from the server which locks those files so no other user can copy them until they are checked back in. We do not need to store revisions for the files.
My initial idea was to use SVN or preferably GIT and force lock on checkout somehow, does this sound feasible or is there a better system?
How big are the files on average? Not sure about GIT haven't used it but SVN should be ok - If you did go with SVN I would trial checking out over Http/Https vs Network Path to the repo as you may get a speed advantage out of one or the other. When we vpn to our repo at work it is literally 100 times faster over http than checking out using a network \\path to the repo.
SVN is a good option, but you will have revisions (this is the whole point of SVN). SVN doesn't lock files by default, but you may configure it so that it does. See http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/svn-book.html?bcsi_scan_554E00F99A9AD604=0&bcsi_scan_filename=svn-book.html#svn.advanced.locking
I don't know git very well, but since it's not a centralized VCS, I'm pretty sure it isn't the right tool for your situation.

Best approaches to versioning Mac "bundle" files

So you know a lot of Mac apps use "bundles": It looks like a single file to your application, but it's actually a folder with many files inside.
For a version control system to handle this, it needs to:
check out all the files in a directory, so the app can modify them as necessary
at checkin,
commit files which have been modified
add new files which the application has created
mark as deleted files which are no longer there (since the app deleted them)
manage this as one atomic change
Any ideas on the best way to handle this with existing version control systems? Are any of the versioning systems more adept in this area?
Mercurial in particular versions based on file, not directory structure. Therefore, your working tree, which is a fully-fledged repository, doesn't spit out .svn folders at each level.
It also means that a directory that is replaced, like an Application or other Bundle, will still find it's contents with particular file names under revision control. File names are monitored, not inodes or anything fancy like that!
Obviously, if a new file is added to the Bundle, you'll need to explicitly add this to your repository. Similarly, removing a file from a Bundle should be done with an 'hg rm'.
There aren't any decent Mercurial GUIs for OS X yet, but if all you do is add/commit/merge, it isn't that hard to use a command line.
For distributed SCM systems like git and mercurial shouldn't be a problem as Matthew mentioned.
If you need to use a centralized SCM like Subversion or CVS, then you can zip up (archive) your bundles before checking them into source control. This can be painful and takes an extra step. There is a good blog post about this at Tapestry Central:
Mac OS X bundles vs. Subversion
This article demonstrates a ruby script that manages the archiving for you.
An update from the future:
If I recall, the problem with managing bundles in SVN was all the .svn folders getting cleared each time you made a bundle. This shouldn't be a problem any more, now that SVN stores everything in a single .svn folder at the root.
Bringing this thread back to daylight, since the October 2013 iWork (Pages 5.0 etc.) no longer allows storing in 'flat file' (zipped), but only as bundles.
The problem is not the creation of version control hidden folders inside such structures (well, for svn it is), but as Mark says in the question: getting automatic, atomic update of files added or removed (by the application, in this case iWork) so I wouldn't need to do that manually.
Clearly, iWork and Apple are only bothered by iCloud usability. Yet I have a genuine case for storing .pages, .numbers and .keynote in a Mercurial repo. After the update, it blows everything apart. What to do?
Addendum:
Found 'hg addremove' that does the trick for me.
$ hg help addremove
hg addremove [OPTION]... [FILE]...
add all new files, delete all missing files

Storing file permissions in Subversion repository

How do you store file permissions in a repository? A few files need to be read-only to stop a third party program from trashing it but after checking out of the repository they are set to read-write.
I looked on google and found a blog post from 2005 that states that Subversion doesn't store file-permissions. There are patches and hook-scripts listed (only one url still exists). Three years later does Subversion still not store file permissions and are hooks the only way to go about this? (I've never done hooks and rather use something that is native to Subversion.)
SVN does have the capability of storing metadata (properties) along with a file. The properties are basically just key/value pairs, however there are some special keys like the 'svn:executable', if this property exists for a file, Subversion will set the filesystem's executable bit for that file when checking the file out. While I know this is not exactly what you are looking for it might just be enough (was for me).
There are other properties for line ending (svn:eol-style) and mime type(svn:mime-type).
There's no native way to store file permissions in SVN.
Both asvn and the patch from that blog post seem to be up (and hosted on the official SVN repository), and that's a good thing, but I don't think they will have such metadata handling in the core version any time soon.
SVN has had the ability to handle symbolic links and executables specially for a long while, but neither work properly on Win32. I wouldn't hold my breath for another such non-portable feature (though it wouldn't be too hard to implement on top of the already existing metadata system.)
I would consider writing a shell script to manually adjust file permissions, then putting it in the repository.
One possible solution would be to write a script that you check in with the rest of your code and which is run as the first step of your build process.
This script runs through your copy of the codebase and sets read permissions on certain files.
Ideally the script would read the list of files from a simple input file.
This would make it easy to maintain and easy for other developers to understand which files get marked as read-only.
Since this wasn't fully said in previous responses yet. I hate to resurrect zombied threads though.
Since adding permission support for SVN would have to accommodate multiple OS's and permission types, NFS, POSIX, ARWED, and RACF
This would make SVN bloated, possibly clash with conflicting permission types like NFS and POSIX, or open up possible exploits/security vulnerabilities.
There are a couple of workarounds.
pre-commit, post-commit, start-commit are the more commonly used, and are a part of the Subversion system.
But will allow you to control the permissions with what ever programming language you like.
The system I implemented is what I call a packager, that validates the committed files of the working copy, then parses a metadata file, which lists out the default permissions desired for files/folders, and any changes to them you also desire.
Owner, Group, Folders, Files
default: <user> www-user 750 640
/path/to/file: <user> non-www 770 770
/path/to/file2: <user> <user> 700 700
You can also expand upon this and allow things such as automated moving, renaming them, tagging revision by types, like alpha, beta, release candidate, release
As far as supporting clients to checkout your repository files with permissions attached to them. You are better off looking into creating an installer of your package and offering that as a resource.
Imagine people setting their repositories with an executable in it set with permissions of root:www-user 4777
This is the updated link for SVN patch which handles unix style file permissions correctly. I have tested out on fedora12 and seems to work as expected:
I just saved it /usr/bin/asvn and use asvn instead of svn command if i need permissions handled correctly.
Many answers have stated that svn does not store file permissions. This may be true, but I was able to solve a dll file without execute permissions problem simply by these steps:
chmod 755 badpermission.dll
mv badpermission.dll ../
svn update
svn rm badpermission.dll
svn commit badpermission.dll -m "Remove dll to fix permissions"
mv ../badpermission.dll .
svn add badpermission.dll
svn commit badpermission.dll -m "Add the dll back to fix permissions"
rm badpermission.dll
svn update
badpermission.dll comes back with execute permissions
#morechilli:
The asvn wrapper from my earlier post and the blog in the OP's post seems to do what you're suggesting. Though it stores the permissions in the corresponding files' repository properties as opposed to a single external file.
I would recommend to generate permissions map using mtree utility (FreeBSD has it by default), store the map in the repository, and, as was mentioned above, run a script that would restore proper file permissions from the map as the first step of the build process.
Locking would not solve this problem. Locking stops others from editing the file. This is a third party application which gets run as part of the build process that tries to write to a file - changing it - which breaks the build process. Therefore we need to stop the program from changing the file which is simply marking the file read-only. We would like that information to be held in the repository and carried across checkins, branches, etc.
Graham, svn doesn't store permissions. Your only option is to wrap your call to svn in a script. The script should call svn with its arguments, then set the permissions afterward. Depending on your environment, you might need to call your script svn and tweak your PATH to ensure it gets called.
I quite like morechilli's idea to have the list of files and permissions checked into the repository itself.
We created a batch file to do this for us. Would prefer actual support in subversion though...
Consider using svn lock to disallow others from writing to the file.

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