[geeks] Versioning FIlesystem

David A de Gruyl david at bhaermandegruyl.org
Thu May 22 19:53:37 CDT 2003


* on [03-05-22 20:42] Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>On Thu, 22 May 2003 vance at neurotica.com wrote:

>> CVS isn't anywhere near as transparent as VMS versioning.

>Neither is adding as a bag on the side of Unix, unless you do it in
>libc.  That'd be an interesting hack.

I basically came to the same conclusion, as unless it is built into the 
operating system (or if you prefer the operating environment -- 
including the shell and utilities) any change will be just a hack.  And 
a confusing one at that.  That is why it should be at the filesystem 
level, with the filesystem handling the versioning, and configuration 
through file attributes specific to the fs.

But, as was mentioned, the only way to get the information out in a 
useful format is to put in some userland utilities for viewing / 
recovering.  Also, it would be very nice to have the transparency of 
editing version 23 at will, without having to recover it and so on, so 
the open syscall should be modified as well.  Of course you could not 
use globbing with this -- but that is by design (sort of).

David

-- 
David de Gruyl <david at bhaermandegruyl.org>
Princeton(ish), NJ



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