An Intro

Hi all,

My name is Kevin Pilch-Bisson. I am a Computer Engineering student at
the University of Waterloo. I have just finished 3rd year, and will be
starting 4th in April.

I am interested in the subversion project for several reasons.

1) I like the idea of something to replace CVS that is compatible but
designed better.

2) I think tracking the history of file moves/renames is fantastic.

3) I am interested in a versioning file system, and I have a few
thoughts on it. (see below)

I would like to stay on the list and talk about design issues, and I am
also thinking about writing a linux file system (again see below), that
might be useful for subversion. I am not sure how much time I will have
to contribute coding. Not as much as I would like :(

Okay on to file systems.

I was thinking that it would be nice to have a file system which does
the following.

1) Stores all the revisions (including history) of a file. The same as
subversion does, but implemented at the file-system layer, so that any
time a change is made, it is in a way automatically committed.

2) Beyond that it should allow all the normal cvs type operations,
tagging, diffs, retrieval of past labels/versions, etc. _AND_ it should
allow retrieval of a file (or tree) based on a timestamp (so you could
say something like: make my system the way it was yesterday before I
made all these crazy changes to it).

3) In addition it would be nice to have tools to move old parts of the
tree onto permanent storage so that disk-space is not wasted
indefinitely. I.e. move the repository to tape/CDROM/etc, then replace
it with a sort of new repository with the current files as the
originals.

What does everyone think of a file system like this. Personally I think
it would be extremely useful! Is anyone interested in helping me learn
enought about file systems and version control to actually implement
something like this?
 

-- 
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kevin Pilch-Bisson
kevin@pilch-bisson.net
http://www.pilch-bisson.net