Bryan Henderson wrote:
The directory is quite visible with a standard 'ls -a'. Instead,
they simply mark it as a separate volume/filesystem: i.e. the fsid
differs when you call stat(). The whole thing ends up acting rather like
our bind mounts.
Hmm. So it breaks user space quite a bit. By break, I mean uses that
work with more conventional filesystems stop working if you switch to
NetAp. Most programs that operate on directory trees willingly cross
filesystems, right? Even ones that give you an option, such as GNU cp,
don't by default.
But if the implementation is, as described, wildly successful, that means
users are willing to tolerate this level of breakage, so it could be used
for versioning too.
But I think I'd rather see a truly hidden directory for this (visible only
when looked up explicitly).
Well, if we're going to have super-secret hidden directories, we might as well
implement them in a namespace framework. Somebody is going to want generic
filesystem namespaces eventually, so having one unified mechanism for doing this
kind of thing will make it much easier, especially for userspace apps which
would need to be modified to be aware of them.
Personally, I'm happy with .snapshot and the like.
-- Chris
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