Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
Plus, the number of files being created under typical
modern systems is at least two (and probably three or four) orders
of magnitude greater. I've got 100,000 files under /usr in Solaris,
and almost 1,000 under my home directory.
wimp :-) I count 88,148 in my main home directory. I'll bet just
running gnome and firefox will get you in the ballpark of 1,000 :-/
None (well, maybe 1 or 2) of which you edit and hence would not
generate versions.
Chad
Richard actually brings up a good point, which answers another question
Chad had for me: exactly how many files do I edit? Which directly
impacts the "directory pollution" problem I've been talking about.
There are essentially three scenarios:
(a) FV is turned on on a per-file basis
(b) FV is turned on on a per-directory basis
(c) FV is turned on on a per-filesystem basis
Now, I think we can all see that you get geometic file explosion in case
(c), as absolutely anything that writes to the filesystem gets
versioned. Things like Web Browser caches alone would kill you.
In case (b), there's quite a bit of explosion, too. There are lots of
apps which create, update, and destroy files frequently in various
directories. Most Office and similar large user apps do this. So it is
very, very easy to have many versions quickly. This can be somewhat
mitigated by NOT turning on FV in directories which are commonly used as
temp dirs (e.g. ~/tmp)
In case (a), you are down to files you actively tell FV to use, which I
agree can be quite manageable. I tend to actively edit a couple of
dozen files frequently, so that number can be manageable, so long as the
number of versions is held down to some limit.
However, in both case (a) and (b) for netFS users, exactly how are they
supposed to indicate that they want FV turned on? There is no symantics
for doing this in any netFS protocol, so we'd have have to have custom
API/tools for them to run to turn on FV.
Also, something to think about: under FV, do old versions of a file
which was deleted (via unlink() or similar) also get deleted?
-Erik
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