Re: Versioning file system

From: Chris Snook
Date: Tue Jun 19 2007 - 16:31:44 EST


Jack Stone wrote:
Chris Snook wrote:
Jack Stone wrote:
H. Peter Anvin wrote:
Chris Snook wrote:
I pointed out NetApp's .snapshot directories because that's a method
that uses legal path character, but doesn't break anything. With this
method, userspace tools will have to be taught that : is suddenly a
special character.
Not to mention that the character historically used for this purpose is
; (semicolon.)
But that would cause havoc with shells which use ; to seperate commands.
Using ; would defiantly break userspace

Jack

I can escape the semicolon just fine in bash. In fact, tab-completion
will do this automatically. That's really a non-issue. It just means
that anyone who wants to use this feature would have to know what
they're doing, which I believe is your goal, right?

I didn't realise this. Would ; break userspace if it was used as the
delimiter?

I have no idea. I've never written a file management utility or library, so I don't know if they handle those specially.

This discussion may be academic as this design is looking less and less
useful/workable.

Well, I'd argue that the most interesting part of this idea is how it works on the inside. You can implement arbitrarily impractical interfaces to test it out as long as your code is modular enough to implement a community-agreeable interface once it's ready for a wider audience.

-- Chris
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