The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: The vi editor causes brain damage by renox
Parent article: The vi editor causes brain damage

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!