The first official release of Metastore: metadata tool for file system trees

The first official release of Metastore: metadata tool for file system trees(freelists.org)

20 points by przemoc 10 years ago | 8 comments

przemoc 10 years ago |

There was another mail sent to ML regarding v1.1.0:

https://www.freelists.org/post/metastore-announce/metastore-...

jcr 10 years ago | |

Thanks for working on this and posting it to hn. The security concerns around storing /etc improperly (i.e. like publicly in a version control system) are well known, but if done right, it could really be useful.

przemoc 10 years ago | | |

metastore was used in etckeeper in the past.

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/announcing_etckeeper/

In less than half a year it was replaced with find scripts.

http://git.joeyh.name/?p=etckeeper.git;a=commitdiff;h=a9ce99...

And I cannot blame etckeeper. Using binary format for storing metadata, i.e. owner, group, perms, xattrs, mtime, makes it too opaque for many use cases, especially in VCS.

metastore v1.1.0, as you can already read, was meant to give metastore (from 2008) a proper release, with fixed bugs and small improvements only. There are plans to make metastore more useful in the future, though.

przemoc 10 years ago |

I guess that some mod intervened here (by bringing this closer to the front page), because even a few hours after posting there were only a few points and it was rather deep in HN. Thank you!

Post title has been also changed, and it's fine. I no longer remember mine, but it was maybe too clunky. But.

metastore should be written using all lowercase letters.

e40 10 years ago |

Some use cases? Seems cool, but I'm having trouble thinking of how I'd use this... thanks.

przemoc 10 years ago | |

Let me quote README file first:

    It was originally written as a supplement to git, which does not store
    all metadata, making it unsuitable for e.g. storing /etc in a
    repository.
    
    metastore can also be helpful if you want to create a tarball of a file
    tree and make sure that "everything" (e.g. xattrs, mtime, owner, group)
    is stored along with the files.

You may use it to store stuff on filesystem that doesn't support perms, owner & group for instance, like FAT, yet still be able to restore it later. Well, FAT doesn't support lot of things, so it's maybe a bad example. Anyway, I did use metastore to store metadata of some ext4 filesystem tree before backuping it on NTFS. It worked quite well.

emmelaich 10 years ago |

A bit like mtree. I have vague plans to integrate something like this to git and/or augeas

przemoc 10 years ago | |

I think that metastore will become much more valuable tool, when some planned stuff will be implemented.

https://github.com/przemoc/metastore/issues/6

https://github.com/przemoc/metastore/issues/7

Drafts described there are not finalized and my view on some matters changed a bit. I'll try to update descriptions one day. metastore needs also some modularization to provide better OS-dependent stuff like xattrs.

All in all metastore will need more or less substantial reworking, to the point where rewriting it and providing converter from binary format may be a simpler solution and leading to cleaner (and thus more maintainable) code.

It was originally written as a supplement to git, which does not store all metadata, making it unsuitable for e.g. storing /etc in a repository. metastore can also be helpful if you want to create a tarball of a file tree and make sure that "everything" (e.g. xattrs, mtime, owner, group) is stored along with the files.