Tool request: "COW patch" that can apply patches to a symlink to a source tree.
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Initial state: just a symlink to the unmodified source tree. Whenever a file is modified, symlink-to-dir expands to dir full of symlinks...
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...and the file symlink to be modified expands to a copy of the original file.
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Use case: efficient testing & use of patches against GCC, Linux (kernel), etc.
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Replying to @RichFelker
This could probably be done with a CoW filesystem overlay - you can skip the symlinks and "just" use FUSE.
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Replying to @eddyb_r
I know it can be done that way but it's not what I want. It's massively disproportionate infrastructure, bug surface, & perf impact.
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Replying to @RichFelker @eddyb_r
Whereas in theory the approach I want could be written in shell script and has essentially no run-time cost, only patch-time cost.
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Replying to @RichFelker
IMO it should be easier to whip up a VFS for usecases like these but I agree the current situation is nowhere near as nice.
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Replying to @eddyb_r
Really depends on your use case. For single fixed deployment, a clean VFS approach would be non-awful.
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Replying to @RichFelker @eddyb_r
OTOH if it's part of a build system you want people to be able to run on arbitrary build hosts, it's show-stoppingly awful.
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In my case I want to use it inside musl-cross-make, keep pristine untarred source trees and COW-apply the patches in each run's build dir.
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