RE: Unix philosophy under the gun?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, August 6, 2001 at 10:05:13 (-0400), Noel L Yap wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: Unix philosophy under the gun?
>
> The Unixey thing to do would be to have a file system that supports 
> versioning.
> Take a look at http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/katie/.  Such a thing would
> provide the most transparency to users.

That wouldn't necessarily be very unix-like at all.  Yes, some of the
features of a versioning filesystem are unix-like, such as being able to
treat old revisions as first-class files and thus be being to use other
existing unix tools directly on revisions as well as the current file
(perhaps creating more revisions in the process).  However that alone
doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the versioning control will be
done with a software tools approach.

While a filesystem that can do versioning is generally interesting from
a research perspective, all of the attempts to build them so far have
resulted in tools that often ignore many of the requirements of a
version control tool from the perspective of the larger software
configuration managment process.  A versioning filesytem might make a
programmer happy, but it won't make it any easier to manage the whole
software process (it may even make it harder!).  Early attempts at Bell
Labs are one example.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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