Re: Versioning Plugin

[Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@gmail.com>]

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Has a ;real' revision control system been considered? Something that
doesn't need to copy the entire file on change.  Taking the techiques
learned from CVS/Subverion et.al. and implimenting a variation of the
versioning database within the file system.

On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 16:56 -0800, Peter van Hardenberg wrote:
> On November 11, 2005 05:59 am, John Gilmore wrote:
> > Does anybody remember GoBack? It was a versioning
> > system for windows 95/98 that was incredibly flexible and useful. Tracked
> > all changes to the whole disk. Old versions of a file? no problem. grab an
> > old version of a directory for referance temporarily? easy. Got a virus?
> > revert the whole HD, and then grab the newer copies of your documents and
> > saved games as needed.
> 
> My thoughts on this:
> 
> The versioning would be an audit plugin. When the file is modified, tag the 
> current version, copy it into a sub-directory (oh, I don't know, say 
> file/.revisions/<number/date>), and disable write access to it. You might not 
> even need extended filesystem attributes for this, but they would be handy 
> for tagging particular versions.
> 
> Copy-on-write would make this action extremely cheap, only adding a couple of 
> extra writes to make it work.
> 
> Given working resource directories, COW, and the ability to set plugins, this 
> might be a relatively easy hack to implement. Given an efficient xpath shell, 
> you could even create a view of your drive on a particular day. 
> 
> If you had a file that was changing often, perhaps you could set an attribute 
> on that file which told it only to clone the file every once in a while. 
> 
> Come to think of it, a userspace daemon could run in the background and 
> replace the need for a plugin, which is probably the better solution. Then 
> you just need COW and files which can contain resources.
> 
> -pvh
> 
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Lares Moreau <lares.moreau@gmail.com>  | LRU: 400755 http://counter.li.org
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