Re: An idea for versiont racking using translators

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 01:15:51PM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> With translators it would be easily possible to hide version tracking
> activity by just stacking a version tracking translator over some
> directory. 
[...]

It would certainly be possible -- but what's the use? Version control is
not interactive, nor does it pass around komplex structured data -- it's
just the kind of use case for which the main UNIX communication
mechanisms (command line arguments and pipes) were created, and
consequently they work very nice here... And Git demonstrates how to
make good use of that :-)

> Can a translator change how cp works, so that copying such a dir would
> clone the repo and layer a new translator upon the target (if the
> target is on a Hurd)? 

No, that's not possible. cp is really a rather dumb action: It reads the
data from the source files, and writes it to the destination files. If
the source files are managed by a translator, the translator will only
see that the files are read, but not where they are written, or to what
purpose...

-antrik-