[geeks] Versioning FIlesystem

Mike Meredith mike at blackhairy.demon.co.uk
Sat May 24 04:13:11 CDT 2003


On Saturday 24 May 2003 02:27, vance at neurotica.com wrote:
> On Fri, 23 May 2003, Mike Meredith wrote:
> > quite a few problems with introducing another special character, so why
> > not use '/' again ?
>
> That would get very confusing, very quickly.

Most people would find versioning very confusing in itself (I saw it 
happenning a few years ago with history & sociology students logging into a 
VAX to run Minitab[0]). I don't think using '/' is too confusing if you 
perceive a file as also being a directory of its versions.

'/' (and \0) are the only characters you can use that don't have a chance of 
conflicting with existing files.

[0]: Who were incredibly pissed off at doing stats when they came to do a warm
     and fuzzy degree as far away from any kind of maths as they could get.



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