Versionsing as part of the File System

On Sat, 22 Apr 2006 17:42:18 -0400, Dan Espen staggered into the Black Sun and said:

When using that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned "G2" excuse for a Usenet make it at least try to do the right thing.

They already can. It's just not done that often. Disk space is cheaper than ever, but people want to use that space for their data, not N+1 iterations of libfoo-1.2.0, libfoo-1.2.1, libfoo-1.2.2 ... etcetera.

Like Dan said. It's been a good 4 years since I've run into any sort of "library versioning" problem on Linux. "If it ain't broke, fix it until it *IS* broke" is the motto of many developers, but this problem's been pretty well solved.

Also, storing this info in the filesystem metadata is more complicated than you might expect. Metadata available in ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS is all handled slightly differently. ISTR some work being done to provide a single ioctl for metadata manipulation no matter what filesystem was being used, but that probably never panned out. And it's insanely easy to edit a file's name, while it's much more of a pain to edit its metadata. (Remember MacOS before X? Yeah, like that.)

Don't forget FAT, where there's barely any metadata available. What happens when somebody tars up their libraries and stores the tarball on a FAT filesystem? You'll have to modify all archiving programs to store this metadata in some way, and restore it. Or you'll have to invent

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL