On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 02:19:46PM -0700, Erik Trimble wrote: > Doing versioning at the file-system layer allows block-level changes to > be stored, so it doesn't consume enormous amounts of extra space. In > fact, it's more efficient than any versioning software (CVS, SVN, > teamware, etc) for storing versions.
Depends on the kinds of changes... Insert a small amount of code at the head of a large source file and most of the blocks might change... > However, there are three BIG drawbacks for using versioning in your FS > (that assumes that it is a tunable parameter and can be turned off for a > FS when not desired): > > [...] > > Maybe when we change filesystems to a DB, we can look at automatic > versioning again, as a DB can mitigate #1 and #3 issues above, and can > actually implement #2 completely. OracleFS, here I come. (<groan>) The way a DB would do this would be by effectively having version-aware interfaces. I think we could extend ZFS to provide versioning, but we'd have to make relevant applications version-aware, and versioning would have to be invisible to applications that aren't version-aware (which also must not create versions automatically). Nico -- _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
