I realise I may be a little late to the party here, but I recently came across the awesome gource with which I made the above video. It’s generated from /etc/ on my VPS – I’m versioning that using etckeeper which gives me a git repository going back to August of this year.

How I did it

This is pretty easy to do. First I grabbed a copy of /etc/ from the VPS to /tmp/etc/ on the laptop (running Ubuntu Maverick), then

sudo apt-get install gource ffmpeg
cd /tmp/etc/
gource \
        -s 1 \
        -800x600 \
        --date-format %Y-%m-%d\ %H:%M:%S \
        --colour-images \
        --disable-progress \
        --camera-mode track \
        --file-filter \.svn \
        --output-ppm-stream - | \
        ffmpeg \
        -y \
        -b 3000K \
        -r 60 \
        -f image2pipe \
        -vcodec ppm \
        -i - gource.avi

Most of the gource options I’ve used are fairly self-explanatory I think. I’m filtering out \.svn there because some of my config files are also versioned with subversion (my apache vhosts, for example) and the video was even denser with those left in. The ffmpeg options I cut ‘n’ pasted wholesale from somewhere, Cargo-Cult-style, because ffmpeg is voodoo.

Speaking of subversion, it’s possible to generate gource videos from SVN projects too, using either git-svn or the python script that you can find on this page.