Re: Recursive modified-timestamp?

[David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com>]

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Hans Reiser wrote:
| Alexander G. M. Smith wrote:
|
|>
|> Possibly.  But I'd like to generalize it a bit.  Percolated attributes
|> are
|> perhaps a better more general idea.  We already have inherited attributes
|> (such as security of children being inherited from the parent) so
|> going in
|> the other direction isn't all that big step, it just needs an
|> application,
|> like your modification detection system.
|>
|>
| The general form of inheritance should not be restricted to inheriting
| from parents.  Parents should merely be a default if nothing is
| specified as what one inherits from.  And when one inherits, one can
| write through to what one inherits from, at least by default.

Right.  Thinking back to the recursive-mtimes, one possible way to get
an mtime for a tree is to have every modification to one of its files
percolate back up the tree (child-to-parent), meaning a parent is
"inheriting" that attribute from each of its children.

This could be made fast by merely having a flag that says "this file has
been modified since this program last checked", so that the change-flag
doesn't have to go all the way back up the tree each time.

One possible way to do this is to give each file/directory a list of
links to each of its parents.  How hard would that be to add?
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