Re: shadowfs
On Fri, May 12, 2000 at 12:17:28PM -0600, Adam Olsen wrote:
> I'm not sure this directly answers your question
[...]
> You shouldn't be able to
> delete files, both for conformity (you can't create them either) and
> because I don't think you can delete what a symlink points to by going
> through the symlink (although I could be wrong).
OK, that would basically be a way for read-only shadowfs. If that's all we
aim at, there should not be a problem for the specifications. Just layer the
whole tree (ignoring contents of non-readable directories) If a file exists
in more than one versions, choose the "topmost" one. Everything beyond that
(like filename patterns etc.) would be additional features that do not
change the basic concept.
Question is, whether read-only is the only thing we want to go for. It would
be absolutly neat, if we had a way to layer filesystems in a absolutely
transparent way, so one could do things like have a read-only system as base
(maybe NFS-shared by several computers?) and a read-write system on top that
takes any changes you make and perhaps copies of frequently used files for
better performance.
Imagine a pre-installed system distributed on DVD (several GB in size) that
you can use just as any normal system, since it writes only the changes on a
fairly small partition (or even a ramdisk)
It might even serve for test-installing some program: Just layer the
complete file-system with a empty read-write system, do the installation,
test it and cleanly dump all the changes afterwards with no risk.
I have no idea whether that justifies the trouble, but at least it sounds
hurdish, doesn't it?
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