Dear lazyweb

[armb]

I want a network filesystem that continues to work when the network goes away, and magically reconciles stuff when it comes back. (For use on a Linux laptop which mostly lives in a docking station, but not always.)

I've found http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ and http://code.google.com/p/tsumufs/

Both of them look as if they are trying to solve exactly this problem, but both look like interesting research projects not really ready for production use. Am I wrong? Have I missed something?

If I fall back on "have a local copy, sync regularly with the server", any recommendations?
("Make it all a DVCS repository" (bazaar looks a front runner, git another strong possibility), and Unison are possibilities.)

(And, related, I want to be able to login while disconnected, but keep account information in step with the stuff currently using NIS.
Use "ypcat passwd" (while connected) and compare with local entries?
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man8/sync-accounts.8.html ?
Something else?)

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

These days, bazaar isn't (in the general case) as well thought of as git or mercurial.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Any specific reasons? (Having done a bit more reading, the "renames are explicitly tracked not inferred" feature of bazaar seems less of an advantage than it did when I was first Googling, and "git is more popular" is probably enough.)

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

My experience of bzr is from a few years ago and it was a bit ropey in basic places (bzrignore comes to mind).. alas I don't have any more than that.

Git and its tools are lightning fast, having been designed to cope with the kernel source tree. hg is OK but sometimes chugs a bit, particularly with large repos (work has around 58k commits), and tortoisehg can be slow at times because of this.

A few years ago, at a previous employer, hg and git were the two front runners in the race, considered about equally powerful - the choice came down to the windows tools being better for hg at that time, though I gather that git may have caught up a bit.