Re: subhurds etc.

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 03:38:08PM +0300, Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 01:58:52AM +0200, olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 09:46:23AM +0300, Sergiu Ivanov wrote:
> > > On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 01:59:49AM +0200, olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net
> > > wrote:

> > > > 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?
> > 
> > Yes. Reusing most of the original system environment, and only
> > replacing specific bits you are interested in.
> 
> I see.  I've always thought that sub-hurds worked in this way right
> now :-( Is it very hard to make things work like this, or is it the
> lack of developer time that hinders sub-hurds from being this
> flexible?

It's mostly lack of a concrete vision...

I have some vague ideas how such partial subhurds could be used; but not
really much of an idea how such a setup would look like exactly...
Probably needs some very concrete use case(s) to work from. And as we
are doing very badly at creating tools and applications that make use of
Hurd's possibilities, there are simply no specific use cases yet.

> I'd like to have a snapshotting filesystem at my box, because having
> experienced the possibility to roll anything back in git, I'd be happy
> to be able to do so with the non-git-managed files :-)

Well, btrfs is not quite ready yet for production use AFAIK; but it
won't take too long I think.

However, you don't really need a snapshotting filesystem for that. While
technically less elegant and efficient, other methods for doing regular
snapshots (AKA backups) existed for ages...

-antrik-