The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 9:51 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785)
In reply to: The vi editor causes brain damage by bronson
Parent article: The vi editor causes brain damage

>And, does anything have a versioned filesystem by default?

You answered yourself the question: VMS did.

> if there really is huge demand for versioning (and I'm skeptical)

There is really a huge demand for versioning, but it's hidden in the big number of 'how do I recover/undelete this file?' requests..

With a versioned filesystem, this would solve a big percentage of the issue except of course in case of hardware errors..

Sure you can say that loosing files is a motivation for doing proper backups, but as proper backups is still largely not done properly, it doesn't seem to work.

The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

And there are soooo many people clamoring for an undelete feature in Ext3 / Reiser, etc...? You claim huge demand but all I see is a sopradic email message and LOTS of people happily living with ext3's "I zero the block pointers, haha!" anti-undelete feature.

Have you actually used VMS? It's a perfect example of why versioned filesystems haven't caught on! Adding a semicolon to roll back in time was easy, yes, but then you'd have to become very intimate with PURGE or you'll blow your quota by the end of the day. And you thought keeping your home directory small was hard in Unix! :)

My position: everybody agrees that versioning would be extremely useful. The problem is, of course, it comes at a cost: performance, capacity, and maintenance. And nobody, not Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Be, Linus, etc have figured out how to reduce the cost to where it's actually worth it.

Hopefully we discover in October that Apple has finally solved this one. If they can show how to do it right, I'll bet Windows and Linux won't be far behind!