On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 16:56 -0800, 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.
if a file is opened, modified 2 times, then closed. u will only generate 1 version right? so "When the file is modified" is inaccurate. > > Copy-on-write would make this action extremely cheap, only adding a couple of > extra writes to make it work. add 1 line at the beginning of a 100MB text file will make this uncheap. all data are shifted. > > 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 >
