Re: subversion as a low-level filesystem

--On February 16, 2005 11:40:58 AM -0600 Steve Greenland <steveg@lsli.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 09:13:45AM -0500, Jeffrey Vaughan wrote:
>> Jos? Moreira wrote:
>> > Hello, i was wondering about the viability of the implementation of a
>> > 'version controller' filesystem (kernel level). I believe that
>> > something like that could be as or more useful that WinFS or similar.
>> > Anyone has an opinion? thanks
>>
>> The VMS filesystem, iirc, was versioning.
>
> Mmmm, kinda sorta. It would keep multiple versions of files, indicated
> by a trailing ';N' on the file name; e.g. foo.txt;1, foo.txt;2, etc.
> Sometimes useful (editor), sometimes *extremely* annoying (program that
> logged to a file every few minutes by opening, appending, and closing.)

You're fine if you're appending, which doesn't create a new version. As
this implies, though, versions aren't static: you can add to, overwrite, or
delete specific versions of a file. In practice, I rarely found this a
problem, but it's addressing a different set of versioning issues than svn.

There was a "journal-based" filesystem available for VMS for a while which
might've allowed you to reconstruct prior moments in a file's existence,
but it faded away pretty quickly.

--
Nostalgically,
Charles Bailey  < bailey _at_ newman _dot_ upenn _dot_ edu >
Newman Center at the University of Pennsylvania
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