[Gluster-devel] Versioning

[Fred van Zwieten]

"Now I am leaning towards git based versioning. Integrate git into
GlusterFS to track changes on specified events (timer, file-close,
dir-tree-modify..). We may not do this via translator interface, but
through the newly proposed simple event/timer interface. "

I am not sure I would like that. Our idea is to make the previous
versions (read-only!) available to the end-users through a separate
mount-point, taking file permissions into account. I am not sure if
that is at all possible when they live inside a git repository.

(disclaimer: I do not know the inner workings of glusterfs nor
translators) I would think making it part (of the receiving part) of
geo-replicator translator would be ideal because it knows what is
going on. If a file /a/b/c is updated it's previous version could be
stored as /pre/a/b/c.<datetime> or /pre/<datetime>/a/b/c. If the
previous versions live on the same file-system you could even play
with inodes to keep only the previous versions of blocks. This would
make it very space efficient (sort of file based snapshotting).

I do agree that using git makes it more modular and independent of the
geo-replicator translator.

I am also curious how you would handle multiple writes in a short time
to the same file without ending up with an equal amount of previous
versions.

Also, I can't find the note you are referring to. Could you please
make a feature wiki page using the template?

Fred