Note: This is an old post about a script I wrote a few months ago about a piece of code that I’m no longer (really) using. I present it here as an archival piece with a boatload of caveats. Enjoy!
I have a problem that I think is not terribly unique: I have a directory of files and I want to maintain two distinct copies of these files at once, and I want a tool that looks at both directories and makes sure they’re up to date. That’s all. Turns out nothing does exactly that, so I wrote a hacked up shell script, and you can get it from the code section:
I hope you enjoy!
Background
You might say, “why not just use git to take care of this,” which is fair. The truth is that I don’t really care about the histories as long as there’s revision. Here’s the situation:
I keep a personal ikiwiki instance for all of my notes, tasks, and project stuff. There’s nothing revolutionary, and I even use deft, dired, and some hacked up lisp to do most of the work. But I also work on a lot of projects that have their own git repositories and I want to be able to track the notes of some of those files in those repositories as well.
Conflicts.
There are some possible solutions:
1. Use hard links so that both files will point at the same data on disk.
Great idea, but it breaks on multiple systems. Even if it might have worked in this case, it freight ens me to have such fragile systems.
Note: the more I play with this, the less suitable I think that it might be for multi system use. If one or both of the sides is in a git repo, and you make changes locally and then pull changes in from a git upstream, the git files, may look newer than the files that you changed. A flaw.
2. Only edit files in one repository or the other, and have a pre-commit hook, or similar, that copies data from the new system to the old system.
I rejected this because I thought I’d have a hard time enforcing this behavior.
3. Write a script that uses some diff3 to merge (potential) changes
from both sources of changes.
This is what I did.
The script actually uses the merge command which is a wrapper around
diff3 from rcs. shrug.
Beyond my somewhat trivial and weird use-case, I actually think that this script is more useful for the following situation:
You use services like Dropbox as a way of getting data onto mobile devices (say,) but you want the canonical version of the file to live in a git repository on your system.
This is the script for you.
I hope you enjoy it!