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Re: An alternative to ".svn" for storing metadata: ADS

From: Clemens Anhuth <clemens_at_froglogic.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:51:58 +0200

On 13.04.2010 11:52, Daniel Apostolov, Webrich Services wrote:
> Dear Ivan,
> I believe that there are 3 file systems that support forks - NTFS,
> Apple's HFS and Novell's NWFS/NSS, thus it is not a Microsoft-specific
> feature. The amount of work required to implement it should
> be acceptable: acessing and modifying ADS files, at least with NTFS,
> is pretty simple. When accessing ADS files, the only difference is the
> naming, which is "regularfile.xxx:adsfile.zzz". The only complication
> comes with listing ADS files, but there is source code around,
> demonstrating how it can be done.
> I came to that idea, because for me the .svn folders are more or lass
> pain in the ass. First, I can never see the real size of my data,
> which would be fixed by using ADS. Second, searching through the
> working copy for files or text is significantly slower and often
> produces unwanted results. Third, sometimes it happens that part of
> the .svn folder tree is deleted by mistake, which causes SVN to get
> into a broken state, from which I usually recover by removing all .svn
> folders, backuping my current working folder, checking out and then
> merging by hand. I'm also not comfortable with having additional files
> and folders that are not a functional part of the web site under my
> web server's root, which interferes with one of the CMS systems I am
> using.

Hello Daniel,

you have to keep in mind the downsides of this approach.

This sort of "hidden" information will suffer the exact same problems as
the forks on other filesystems: They can be forgotten, then your copy of
the working copy is broken. The support for them is platform specific
(downside for cross-platform tools, technologies, scripts which have to
implement specific support for them, for example Java-based file
managers, any sort of glue-code, shell scripts, etc.). (Apple dropped
them in favor of explicit files/folders AFAIK, to avoid data loss in
case of copying to a SMB file server, USB stick, etc. pp.)

It is good/better that the Subversion project tackles this on a more
fundamental level, like Jean-Marc suggests.

Kind regards

Clemens Anhuth

--
www.froglogic.com - Squish - Multi-Platform GUI Testing
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Received on 2010-04-13 12:52:47 CEST

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