Repliversion Online Manual

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Repliversion is a package that allows you to automatically retain versions of files that you edit. Using “prune” and “skip” configuration directives you can control how many versions are retained, along with the frequency of their retention. Presently repliversion allows versions to be posted to either a gitlab or github repository, be it private or public, with support for separate versioned watch folders to be posted to different repositories according to configuration settings designated by the end-user.

Tip

A beta version of repliversion (version 1.1, .deb package file) can be downloaded from https://deb.repliversion.org

Intended User Audience

This initial release of repliversion is designed for end-users who might not be git gurus. You can opt to not use git with repliversion, but versioning will then be retained only on the local hard disk (something to keep in mind should your laptop ever get lost, stolen, or damaged…) It is also designed to be easy to use for Linux KDE plasma users since it supports “context menus” in the KDE Dolphin file manager (though “command line” support is also an option…)

Note

Note: Depending upon general interest, future support for bitbucket repositories will be a possibility, along with support for gnome and other Linux desktops. Check out the Wishlist.

Present Limitations of Repliversion

  • Repliversion relies on the Linux “inotify” interface; so support is only for Linux.

  • The backup versions that repliversion generates are limited to about 76KB in size. If your average line length of a text file is 50 characters, that will backup a file that is about 1,500 lines (your milage may vary; binary files are also supported…) If a file in a watched folder is saved and it is too large, you will receive a fading popup warning notification that a version for it was not saved. This limit can be enlarged in the configuration settings if you are using fast hardware, such as a performant solid state drive and lots of RAM.

Note

Note: Depending upon general interest, support for leveraging off of “EXT4 journaling” info that can insure that file versions are guaranteed to be captured, no matter their size, is a possibility. Since many source code documents are not larger than 76 KB, until then this initial release can provide a versioning safety net for many developers and authors.

  • This initial version is not designed to support “symbolic links” in watched folders; use of such is at your own risk (a future version might address this…) [If you are a new Linux user and you don’t know what that is, you’re probably not using them.]

  • Repliversion requires the use of a privileged Linux service, and must be installed with root privileges (this is because of the varied file permissions that need to be managed for possibly different desktop users…) The author would welcome a bug bounty for repliversion, but until then: feel free to have a developer you trust inspect the code; its git is: https://git.repliversion.org.