Pam Ochs wrote: > Junhao, > > Why does option 2 cause a loss of institutional knowledge? Is file > ownership being used to track authorship? Or is there a concern that > people will delete or overwrite data? > Maybe a content management solution would meet your requirements more > effectively? > I supported an R&D environment once in which engineers used Unix file > ownership and modification timestamps for code versioning. It didn't > work very well. I tried to get them to use CVS, but they didn't care > for it. > > -Pam
Well, I work in a biology research environment. Currently files/datasets are at least 2GB each, and a new equipment is coming in with Terabyte-sized data. I don't really want to push these into a database, that is just painful. You actually hit the mark on the reason we try to keep file ownership. Like you said, keeping file ownership tracks authorship. We usually process samples in triplicates or more (for statistical reasons), and knowing the identity of the person generating that dataset may become important later. Of course, the plus point of preventing overwriting/deletion by others keeps finger-pointing and retrieval from backups to a minimum. The best technical solution to prevent loss of such knowledge may be to use a document management solution. Metadata of each dataset can be logged for future reference, and changes in file names can be tracked as well. However, my users don't seem enthusiastic about the maintenance overhead though. Regards, Junhao _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
