From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <056b01c178a8$aef03060$b6f7c6d4@cybercable.fr> From: "Boyd Roberts" To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu> References: <200111281909.fASJ9xT58241@devil.lucid><20011128185430.958E519A33@mail.cse.psu.edu><200111281909.fASJ9xT58241@devil.lucid> <3.0.5.32.20011128232123.018d8310@mail.real.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] Python filesystem MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 08:37:21 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2c6d5fde-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > CVS or a derivative thereof, should be a filesystem. It seems to me that > something like ftpfs is very close to what a CVS fs could be. It should probably be a filesystem, but nothing like ftpfs. FTP is there to copy files. CVS is just a meta RCS which is not a good thing. RCS is useful and simple but it's useless if you want to use it for serial #'s in DNS zone files (SCCS is great for that, but not good for much else). I think /n/dump needs a layer or a concept of grouping a chunk of stuff together which constitutes a release. Now, let's not go mad and go the whole hog as Vesta did. One day they found a serious design flaw in Vesta -- it ran out of space, apart from he fact it was excruciatingly slow. Instead of building a list of things to blow away [failsafe] it built a list of things to keep. The trouble was that the 'list' was written to a file, but the file-system(s) were full -- so, it created the null list of things to keep. This resulted in that it went ahead and it started to delete everything. FYI: Vesta was a project from SRC. It sort of did /n/dump but instead of bind-ing the universe together it would just re-create it from scratch -- ouch. Vesta may have been able to re-create the universe in small n days, but it was extremely efficient in destroying in fewer.