Git

[chombee]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 11:02:53AM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach chombee <chombee at nerdshack.com> [2007.11.26.0233 +0100]:
> > I'm not versioning everything in my homedir, I leave out music,
> > photos, videos and the like,
> 
> why? Git's storage format should actually be able to deal with those
> quite well, better than the diff/snapshot/weave-based VCS at least.

I guess I just didn't want the repository to get too big. 
 
> I don't see the benefit of using Git for mail. Why not offlineimap?

I'm not sure if I will bother to use git or not. Depends how 
much hassle it is. Synchronisers like offlineimap make me 
queasy though. It is fairly easy to destroy all your email. 
Say something goes wrong on a client, and your email gets 
deleted or moved or something on that client. Then without 
noticing it you run offlineimap. The change gets propagated 
to the server, and now all your email is gone from the 
server too. offlineimap will delete thousands of emails 
instantly without warning if it feels it's the right thing 
to do. The first you know about it is when you read 
"Deleting 10,000 emails from imap (inbox)". If you are 
watching, you may manage kill the program after the first 
few thousand. I have had this happen, I'm sure you can tell. 
So you lose both copies. You can tell it to just set the 
delete flag and not expunge, which is what saved me. I 
also wonder what happens if emails get corrupted on one 
client, or if offlineimap's metadata gets corrupted. In 
theory, the more client copies you have the more likely 
corruption will happen, and if corruption happens on any one 
of them then at some point it will be synced to the master 
copy and then to all the other clients.

So I like git because it keep versions and because it does 
cryptographic checks to find corruption.