Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:07:40 -0700 (PDT) | | From | david@lang ... | | Subject | Re: Versioning file system |
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On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 02:03:07PM -0400, 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. Userspace already knows that files beginning with . are special >> and treat them specially. We don't need a new special character for every >> new feature. We've got one, and it's flexible enough to do what you want, >> as proven by NetApp's extremely successful implementation. Perhaps you >> want a slightly different interface from what NetApp has implemented, but >> what you're suggesting will change the default behavior of basic tools like >> tar and ls. This is not a good thing. > > I think I used one of those systems once (or at least another one with > .snapshot feature). It managed to completely avoid user space problems > by never actually showing .snapshot in directory listings, but you could > always cd to it or refer to it explicitly. You never risked having tar > or find or anything else accidentally pick it up. Very nice interface.
since anything starting with . is considered a 'hidden' file per *nix tradition it's ignored by many programs and optionally ignored by most others (and anything that doesn't ignore . files when presending files to the user has many other problems on modern desktop systems anyway ;-)
the only trouble I ever had with the .snapshot approach is when tar or find would decend down into the .snapshot when I didn't really intend for it to do so.
David Lang - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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