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Re: Hiding nodes with unionmount


From: Arne Babenhauserheide
Subject: Re: Hiding nodes with unionmount
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 16:04:49 +0200
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Am Mittwoch, 5. August 2009 12:41:59 schrieb Sergiu Ivanov:
> AIUI, Zheng has a partially working implementation of rootless
> subhurd.  antrik asked him to make his changes public, even though
> they may not be the ones bringing around the complete functionality.

That would be nice. (As I understand it) subhurd is one of the things which 
really show the possibilities the Hurd offers, so having a user-subhurd is 
almost a requirement for being taken serious. 

> Yes, this is true.  I'd say the VCS filesystems topic should be
> revisited and thought over more attentively.  Committing at some
> intervals, dynamically adjusted to the disk load (like: ``commit more
> often when more operations are done'') could be a nice (and simple)
> solution for desktop systems.

Also a second layer could be added where userspace programs could trigger a 
commit. 
"commit if Important mail received" or "commit if central config file changed"

> Indeed, having large diff sets trigger a commit should work nicely.

> Ah, you are probably talking about the index.  That's an interesting
> idea :-) Though I'd opt for using some temporary branches rather than
> the index.  This shouldn't be much slower, but will allow branch
> switches (although I cannot tell now whether this is necessary at all

Sounds also nice, and it would be compatible with using different VCS systems 
(like Mercurial). 

> > ouch, seems I suffered from the "why take the simple path, when we can
> > choose the hard one"-disease ;-)
>
> So, I'm not the only guy suffering from this? ;-)

Definitely not :) 

> In this case the package manager doesn't store the modifications.  It
> can only hide or show files, which allows the user to do only the rm
> operation, since creating a new configuration file may be, actually, a
> modification of the base one.  What should happen to customized system
> (configuration) files in this case?

They would simply be snapshot - no diffs saved, but only the new file. 

> > > Also, I'm
> Indeed, I somehow forgot about this detail.  Anyway, I still cannot
> see how a package manager could store modifications in files.  I think
> the only way would be to store the user modified files somewhere and
> make them cover the base files when setting mine.  (I think this is
> what your are suggesting and it's only now that I understand it :-( )

Jupp. 

> Hm... I wonder how often the situation when a user does few
> modifications to system configuration files happens.  If we intend to
> make the user feel at home by using translator mine, it's very likely
> that they would like modify quite a lot in their system.

And then a VCS would be more useful, since it will save diskspace when we have 
many users and only smaller modifications, but to many files.  

> Indeed, a proper resource accounting framework might result in a
> complete isolation of different users.  So, let's port the Hurd to
> Viengoos ;-)

The state should be here (but isn't...): 
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/viengoos.html

Some info might be here: 
- http://projectxoo.blogspot.com/

> Well, updates in the base system are a serious problem whatever
> mechanism of storing user data we choose.  The most fundamental issue
> is that use configuration files are bound to become outdated, if the
> user does not update the explicitly (and we aren't allowed to expect
> the user to do that), so it is anyway necessary to update user
> configuration files somehow.  I think that it is reasonable to allow
> the user to solve merge conflicts via something like dispatch-conf in
> Gentoo, but this is pretty orthogonal with the storage method: this
> approach could be implemented in both VCS and package manager
> approaches.

Jupp. 

> I'll read these links today.  Sorry for not having read them so far --
> it's lack of time, as usual :-(

No problem. I know that problem far too well myself... 

Best wishes, 
Arne

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Zwei Polizisten sind sofort da und halten ein Transparent davor. 

        "Illegale Szene. Niemand darf das sehen."

Der Mann wird ausgeraubt, erstochen und verblutet, 
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                      (http://draketo.de)
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