[geeks] Versioning FIlesystem

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 22 May 2003, David A de Gruyl wrote:

> 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).

I think you could make a pretty good fudge of this by adding support
into fopen() and readdir().  You could always assume that the user
wanted the latest version of things, provided that you wanted a second
character to treat as "special", like ':'.

The problem with doing it in the filesystem is that it's not consistent;
you'd have versioning on some filesystems, but not on others.  Doing the
versioning in the runtime library (or, if you wanted, the kernel) means
that you can have it anywhere.  Unless you're storing diffs agains the
file in the filesystem, it's really more a function of the namespace
than the filesystem, anyway.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "Lawsuit...why doesn't it surprise me that more
Thorndale, TX      (    than half of that word is Suit?"
                    )                                  --George Adkins