How to view a linux file?

Vault for embedded linux system development?

• Does anyone successfully use Vault to do embedded linux development (including maintaining root file system permissions, check in from the development platform and the target as well)? We're a small firm that has a Vault repository going back several years. We've recently come under the need to Linux work as well to accommodate the needs of our customers. Linux and Vault aren't immediately hospitable to each other. We have the mono client working on one of our dev machines for one platform. We are not sure we can afford to do that on every platform that we need to be able to develop on, but we do need working source control on every platform. Mono is a pretty big dependency (from a configuration/install angle, to a runtime requirement) for us to repeatedly meet it. We're trying to see if we have to go for a two source control system, or we can successfully use vault to check-in useful and frequent versions for our Linux development. Here are our requirements that we know of: Source Control Client can work on or with a variety of Linux systems (including some embedded targets) Source Control Solution will not fiddle with rwx permission bits or ownership (important for developing and maintaining root filesystems) Can check in/out files with a minimum of hassle and can use comments Can be used with a variety of versions of linux (all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, basically) Can be used in a directory structure that isn't necessarily wholly owned by vault Can easily add files from the command line and not have to fiddle with lots of settings per files Can easily revert from the Linux client Can view check-in comments from the Linux client Can easily diff (possibly using a separate windows client). Will not fiddle with the end of line characters in the file Will handle the end of line character in the diffs Can vault do this? Is there some mix of NFS/NIS/webDAV/smb that can allow it to do all of the above via the windows client without trouncing the file permissions? Does anyone have a setup for this? Also, if anyone has two system repositories that handle this, featuring Vault on the windows side, I'd also like to hear both details and reasons why you went that way. --Michael Langford

• Answer:

  Gah... I wish you had asked a couple of years ago when I was still working in a Vault shop. And doesn't Vault monkey with your rwx bits anyway, or did that get fixed? I used to work in a StarTeam shop, and you're going to hate me for saying this, but I had a dedicated PC box on KVM for check-ins and checkouts to an SMB share mounted via DAVE on OS9 because throwing hardware at it was the quickest way to solve the problem. Can you just run the windows client under virtualization or WINE? I didn't have any problems building a custom command-line client to Vault using their .NET APIs when we realized the damn thing gets confounded by complicated things like locked and open files at check-out.