Re: Complaining after fair notice of dropping XP support. Was: Not very nice at all.

[Erik Soderquist <ErikSoderquist@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 7:38 PM, Peter A. Castro wrote:
> Greetings, Erik,
>
> A good magician never reveals how the trick works.  8^)
>
> Sadly I'm not a good magician.
>
> It's not all that complicated, if you think about it.  Each time a new
> setup.ini is generated only a hand full of packages was actually updated, so
> really, day-to-day, there's not all that much change.
>
> I keep a delta database and each time I grab a new setup.ini I compare all
> of the packages listed to my existing database.  Anything new, I pull down
> and add to the archive.  Anything already present I don't re-pull.  Think of
> it as de-duplication on a package level (though I do this for more than just
> setup.ini, but that's a separate trick).
>
> It's only if you decide you want a complete copy of all packages for any
> given circa that the amount of data instantiating is alot.
>
> Then, from the setup.ini, I create a new circa directory and, really, the
> smoke-and-mirrors of the trick is that it's all symlinks to the real package
> storage, of which I have exactly one copy.  Hence, 500Gb instead of 535Tb.
>
> So, um, "Ta-da"! :-)
>
> Oh, this is all automated, btw.  I hardly touch it except to clean out old
> logs and do backups from time to time.
>
> Sorry, it wasn't all that good a trick, was it.

The automation details are primarily what I'm after, though it could
have been something like ZFS with deduplication turned on

I'm wondering if I could apply your automations to a few background
projects I'm working on

Would also be interesting to see how cleanly the existing setup could
be mirrored knowing the details of the automation... rsync would
happily copy the symlinks, and once created, a Time Machine mirror
*should* be able to "stay in sync" with the original time machine by
pulling from the cygwin main sources in the same manner.



-- Erik

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