[9fans] Update on Fossil+Venti Stuff

["Devon H. O'Dell" <devon.odell@gmail.com>]

I think everybody is a little confused about Fossil and Venti
interaction. When I started this project, it was under the idea that
Fossil was essentially a cache. It stored stuff, and when it either
got too full or something else, it would start writing files out to
Venti.

As I've been copying files over to my machine, I've noticed Fossil get
fuller and fuller, but not sync anything over to Venti. Upon
attempting to find information about this, we came up with:

http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@cse.psu.edu/msg03210.html

Bruce doesn't sound too happy here, and since Plan 9 doesn't have any
version control or any commit logs (that I'm aware of), I can't tell
whether any of these bugs have been fixed. Or, if so, whether they've
been released. As my Fossil fills from 15 to 30 GB out of 35GB (with
180GB in my current Venti arena), I don't want to take this chance.

My ideal usage of Fossil+Venti was to use it as expandable, persistent
storage for my music. I'm finding out that this idea won't work
because Venti exists as expandable archival storage. Which implies
that files have to be deleted from Fossil before they'll end up in
Venti. This would be fine with me, however, it seems that, by doing
this, there's no way to get all of my mp3s listed in a single
directory -- they would be archived by snapshot date / number, and I'd
have to search through all of those to get a full list of music. This
isn't really what I want.

I could have probably saved myself a lot of suffering had I realized
this sooner. Though, I just seem to recall a couple people doing this
type of set-up, so I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

Either way, I rarely delete files, and that seems to be the only way
to get them into Venti. Or maybe I'm just missing things altogether.

If there is a way to do what I'm wanting with Venti and Fossil, I'd
love to see it. This isn't really a bitching and moaning and whining
session, because this realization is probably more my fault for not
researching enough, but regardless, I'd like to see something that can
do what I'm looking for in the future, whether I have to write it
myself or not. I guess this is sort of a probe as to how many people
would find this useful versus not (versus already possible and I'm
just dense).

--Devon