On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 5:38 PM, Vincenzo Ciancia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Il giorno gio, 08/05/2008 alle 02.24 +0100, chombee ha scritto: > > > > Using git is ridiculously difficult and technical by the standards of > > most normal users, but I see no reason why a versioning system could > > not > > be built in to the OS or the desktop environment and function > > completely > > without user interaction until the user wants to recover a previous > > version of something. And that can be made very simple and easy to do. > > Imagine it being virtually impossible to lose any of your work, ever. > > Isn't that a killer feature? Why hasn't this happened? > > It is technically feasible using fuse, and there have been attempts in > the past (such as the "wayback" filesystem [1]). OSX does automatic > backup and versioning, but I don't know how all these systems handle the > main problem, which is: the file size will grow without bounds. We need If we define a users work as a user's typing, we could easily save this permanently. A user typing at 60wpm 24/7 generates less than 200MB a year. When a small, easily diffable, file appears in something like My Documents and is gradually expanded over a few days edited over If a small version-control friendly file appears on the users desktop I think it is reasonable to store it permanently. If we notice that a file has the same md5 sum or name as an already archived file, we could try just doing a diff. We could have an alert (like the update-manager one) suggesting to the user that they insert a blank CD/DVD once a month, and then get up to 4.4GiB a month to play with, which is probably more than enough to permanently store your average users documents and photos etc. I imagine Privacy would be a more serious issue than space. Backing up data considered especially important online is also an option although privacy issues would be too severe to do this by default IMHO. a way to delete old revisions, a way to know when the file is large and > versioning would kill the machine, in the latter case we need a way to > warn the user and also Possibly the alert could mention files that haven't been backed up recently, and why. -- John C. McCabe-Dansted PhD Student University of Western Australia
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