Re: subhurds etc. (was: Hiding nodes with unionmount)

[Sergiu Ivanov]

Hello,

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 01:59:49AM +0200, olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 11:14:32AM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> 
> > And it would be nice to be able to just use the same base Hurd for the
> > main hurd and all subhurds - it needs a readonly mounted partition, so
> > it might be possible to use the same partition for different subhurds
> > and unionmount the specific files into it. 
> 
> This should be possible; but I don't think that subhurd is really the
> right tool for this. None of the system-wide mechanisms would works in a
> useful fashion this way.
> 
> In fact pure subhurds are the most boring use of Hurd mechanisms IMHO --
> it's not much different than traditional container solutions like Linux
> VServer or OpenVZ. Aside from debugging purposes, they are mostly
> interesting as a demonstration of what is possible :-)
> 
> It's much more interesting to have a partially customized environment
> *without* booting a complete extra system instance; but rather accessing
> the main system for most stuff. That's what I'm calling "light-weight
> subhurd-like environments" -- but it's all very vague, as many of my
> ideas :-(

Are you talking about reusing other base system services besides
terminal and root store?
 
> > We should be careful with talking about that, though: VCS filesystems
> > have been ridiculed almost as efficiently as the Hurd :) 
> 
> Note that while true version controlling filesystems are rather
> unpopular, snapshotting filesystems (ZFS, Btrfs) are quickly becoming
> standard.
> 
> The difference is that snapshotting is done explicitely at certain
> points of time, rather than implicitely on certain events.

Hm, are git commits really different from snapshots?

Regards,
scolobb