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
