Re: Versioning Plugin

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

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
>
>  
>
Yup, sounds good to me, it just needs someone to write it.   A later
version could implement a special compression plugin that spanned the
multiple file versions.....

Hans