Re: Versioning File Systems?

[Thomas Zimmerman]

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On 18-Apr 12:55, Kent Borg wrote:
[snip]
> I am envisioning a richer version of the file stage.  Just as users
> currently decide when to check in a version and when to checkpoint
> versions, I am imagining that sort of decision would still be made,
> but there would be a lower level of granularity that could be looked
> at if desired.  Big infrequent changes to a file would all be
> recorded, and frequent little changes would be subject to some
> heuristic.  It doesn't make sense to record a file's state so often
> that it isn't even self-consistent.  For example, recording all the
> changes over the course of the save of a big Star Office drawing would
> be silly, most would be intermediate and dependent on the changing
> epheneral internal state of Star Office.  I don't know the details of
> a reasonable heuristic other than obvious things such as when a file
> of flushed or closed or not touched for some significant time.

Why not commit versions on sync and close. That would seem to carry the lea=
st
surprise for the user. When I sync a filesystem/dir that would seem like a =
time
to make sure any changes make it to disk. And when a file is closed you don=
't
expect any more changes to that file.

>=20
> > That would actually be pretty interesting because it might also allow y=
ou to
> > back out editor screwup ;-)
>=20
> Writing an editor to take advantage of such underlying features would
> be pretty interesting too, it could be integrated into undo/redo
> features. =20
>=20
> Navigating such an historical fabric turns into a really interesting
> user interface problem.

Why teach current tools anything about it at all? Make this a tool you run =
on
the filesystem. If you _need_ to see earlier versions, it far past time to =
be
hoping emacs did the right thing.
=20
> > However, deducing change sets is more difficult.
>=20
> I think change sets for source code would still be based on versions
> declared by a human to be of some specific interest.  But changes sets
> for a computer's configuration might be implicit in the running of rpm
> or chkconfig, or reboots of the system, or saved edits to
> configuration files.  Etc.
>=20
> Certainly what I am envisioning would have immediate use in looking at
> changes to specific files, but would require more structure imposed to
> be useful a system configuration management tool or source code
> control system.
[snip MS vaperware envy]

Thomas

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