Re: [Monotone-devel] newbie question - SHA1 vs serials

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 12:30:11PM -0700, K. Richard Pixley wrote:
>    I want to be able to determine how many branches exist, who created them,
>    who maintains them, what the common usages are, who's using which, and
>    typical code churn in each.  I want to be able to determine code pedigrees
>    at a glance, merge status at a glance, I want to be able to create a
>    sandbox using bits from different branches and I want to be able to grep
>    the heads of all branches for particular strings.
> 
>    How's that for a start?

Pretty demanding ?  :-)
I'd say with a handfull of scripts in a scripting language of your choice you 
should be able to get most of that information out of monotone (well, not the 
sandboxing IMHO)

>    Certainly, if I
>    want them to do backups, I need to be able to tell them when the info on
>    disk is stable and recoverable.
> 
>    The standard initial answer is simply to shut down the CSM and database,
>    make them unavailable for a while, block access to the file system, sync
>    it, then back it up.  For small groups, this is usually acceptable as

I'm not sure I understand you here and I am not sure you understood esnyder 
before. He proposed to set up a second monotone databse (either on the local or 
a remote server) and synchronize regularly, e.g. all 5 minutes. That gives you 
always a reliable backup database on a different file system. That "backup" 
server you can easily shut down and copy to a tape (or whatever) at any point 
in time without down times for the user.

spaetz