[lug] Version Control Device Special Files?

[Quentin Hartman]

I don't think anything would deal well with device special files. It's just
not something they're built for. I'd think your best bet would be to tar up
the state of the special files (in /dev I assume? Things like /proc will
definitely explode any attempts to archive them) and then drop that into
the source control repo. Tar has special support for the device node info
in /dev and doesn't try to actually open the files. I would be shocked if
there were any source control system that would handle that directly with
any grace.

That said, do you really need to save the /dev and other non-files? In
modern systems (even embedded ones I've worked with) that should all get
rebuild dynamically by the kernel and whatnot. Can you safely just skip
them?

QH


On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 2:21 PM, <stimits at comcast.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is probably not practical, but I have need to deal with version
> control of several small embedded file systems, and would like to put them
> under subversion.
>
> The ability to track the file system from two different vendors plus my
> own modifications, where large parts of these file systems are in common,
> are required. Those needs combined with subversion branching and merging
> would give me a very good way of comparing changes and exporting merges and
> edits, both from the different vendors and myself. I don't care about
> inefficiencies of copying entire linux file systems, nor do I care if
> binary file versioning is inefficient.
>
> The trouble is that svn cannot store or version device special files.
> Named pipes, character or block device special files, sockets, or anything
> "special" breaks svn. Other than obtaining a copy of someone else's git
> repo, I'm not really skilled with git (e.g., I've not set up a git server),
> and not sure what it does if I want to maintain separate vendor branches
> while sometimes merging parts of those branches. If subversion handled
> device special files I'd have everything I need...but what would be my
> other options? Does git deal well with device special files? What other
> version control methods would be useful?
>
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