[Discuss] Versioning File Systems

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 05/07/2012 07:48 AM, David Kramer wrote:
> On 05/05/2012 03:13 PM, MBR wrote:
>> On 5/4/2012 7:13 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
>>> Versioning isn't revision control. Revision control isn't versioning.
>>> There is some overlap in what they do but they aren't the same thing.
>>> --Rich P. 
>> That's becoming clear.  I'm trying to understand the difference.  It
>> seems like versioning is having the operating system do for all files
>> what emacs does for text files.  Is it that versioning automatically
>> provides me with some number of backup copies of the file that I can go
>> back to in case I screw something up, as long as I don't mistakenly
>> delete the whole file.  And that's contrasted with revision control
>> which is not automatic.  It requires a conscious decision to save a
>> version, but can track file deletion and renaming, and knows about sets
>> of file revisions that produce a working system.  Do I have that right?
> In the context of software development, it is much more important to
> have a snapshot of ALL FILES at any point in time than one particular
> file, since they depend on each other so heavily.  Versioning
> filesystems won't do that.
Agreed. The bottom line is that versioning file systems, like VMS,
provide a certain amount of  protection, but they do not replace the
need for a good functioning code control system. Conversely code control
systems are not a substitute for file versioning.

The bottom line is how difficult is it to recover a lost file when you
accidentally delete it. Versioning is just one technique that was used.
At work we essentially have backups (like just about everyone else), and
only a couple of times have I had to go back and recover a lost file.
But it is also the catastrophic situation where versioning does not
help. While I use git for the products I work on, I have a few times
used emacs versioning to go back because I made a stupid mistake. (Bash
scripts can be evil when you have an out of place quote mark :-)

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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