Re: Versioning File Systems?

[Joshua MacDonald <jmacd@namesys.com>]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 12:55:30PM -0400, Kent Borg wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 05:27:58PM +0200, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> 
> > That would actually be pretty interesting because it might also allow you to
> > back out editor screwups ;-)
> 
> Writing an editor to take advantage of such underlying features would
> be pretty interesting too, it could be integrated into undo/redo
> features.  
> 
> Navigating such an historical fabric turns into a really interesting
> user interface problem.

There was a paper presented at SCM8 on just such a system.  They used Emacs.

    Multi-Grain Version Control in the Historian System
    Makram Abu-Shakra and Gene L. Fisher
    California Polytechnic State University, USA

    This paper describes Historian, a version control system that supports
    comprehensive versioning and features to aid history
    navigation. Comprehensive versioning is supported through frequent and
    automated creation of versions which typically results in a large number
    of versions. To reduce user overhead in history navigation, the
    hierarchical structure present in most documents is utilized to support
    fine-grained version control. The series of document editing operations is
    also organized hierarchically and can be used for navigation as well.

-josh