Re: [Jmol-developers] [Jmol-users] Scripting documentation mirror

[Rolf H. <rh...@fl...>]

Robert Hanson wrote:
> ok, that's checked in.
> 
> Now we need a system to ensure these are synced well. What do you recommend?
> 
On your side it is very easy. Just check in any changes with 'svn' as
soon as possible.

On the mirror side it is also not very complicated.

On Linux/Unix systems it is very easy to run scripts periodically.
The script could run a "svn update" command once or twice a day (or
whatever frequency we decide is appropriate).

I would not recommend to run the "svn update" command directly on the
directory that is used by the mirror web server. If anything goes wrong
with the svn command it might break the mirror.

So usually I maintain 3 copies:

1) the directory used by "svn update"   (mirror)
2) the directory used by the web server (current)
3) a second directory on the web server (new)

If there was any change in the "mirror" directory then the content of
"mirror" is synced with "new". For large amounts of data with little
changes I usually use the "rsync" command for this. But since the
documentation is currently only ~500MB a simple copy command might be
sufficient.

After syncing to "new" is finished there are done some consistency
checks. If no errors were detected "current" is renamed finally to "old"
and "new" is renamed to "current". Besides being able to do error
checking this method also avoids intermediate states within the mirror
where some files are old and some are new.

At the beginning of the next update "old" is renamed to "new" so that
"rsync" must only update it.

I will set up this next week for our mirror.

Regards,
Rolf