Andy "Krazy" Glew is a computer architect, a long time poster on comp.arch ... and an evangelist of collaboration tools such as wikis, calendars, blogs, etc. Plus an occasional commentator on politics, taxes, and policy. Particularly the politics of multi-ethnic societies such as Quebec, my birthplace. Photo credit: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj
Monday, January 30, 2012
Version controlling VCS metadata
My project .hg/hgrc is growing pretty long.
It needs to be under version control.
Unfortunately, hg does not, refuses to, version metadat such as .hg/hgrc. Security. Since .hg/hgrc may contain executable hooks...
Seems to me there should be a better way. E.g. disabling it's executability, although allowing it to be versioned.
Or - since some (but by no means all) such metadata is per repo, and is meaningless in a clone, perhaps there should be a meta-VCS system. This is fairly natural for me, since i have had my repos nested within each other for decades.
Unfortunately, not so natural for Mercurial.
Try the projrc extension: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ProjrcExtension
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing me to projrc. Looks good.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I may be missing something: it uses .hg/projrc. My understanding was that nothing under .hg was version controlled. Am I missing something?
projrc looks great for distributing setup from a central place.
I'll have to play around with it, and probably read the code, since it is security related.
A comment on comments. I love comments, especially like the one above that points me to useful stuff that may solve the issue I raised in my blog.
ReplyDeleteI am also happy to have anonymous people post comments. Like many people, I hate being forced to register at a website if I just want to leave a comment on a blog or modify a wiki.
(Note: adding a comment to a blog is much less vulnerable to abuse than changing a wiki page. It's much easier to back out a comment than an edit. Moreover, adding a comment to a blog does not change the original blog entry. Hmmm... I may have to add something to my list of Blog vs. Wiki pros and cons. (Some wikis have comment add-ons...))
Anyway, I'm okay by having Anonymous comments.
But, it sure would be nice to know who made a post. Assuming, of course, that it is not some big secret.
I suspect usually it not a big secret.
I suspect that most Anonymous comments are left by people who wouldn't mind signing their names, except (1) registering with the site is a pain, and (2) even just adding by hand something the equivalent of an email or USEnet news .signature is also a pain.
I wonder if there could be a browser extension that provided a .signature equivalent for the sort of text boxes that are associated with adding a blog comment?
Of course it would have to be filtered. E.g. have it prompt annoyingly, unless the site is on a whitelist, or not never even suggest adding a .signature if on a blacklist.
And it would be more of a challenge for non-text box input, such as GUI/WYSIWYG text editors.
But it might be nice.
Weblog: comments easy, identification of comments a pain.
USEnet: comments and ide thereof easy.
Wikis: comments not so easy.