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The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

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Saturday, June 23, 2012

Ubiquitous tracking (and versioning)

Sometimes I wish that the whole bloody filesystem was capable of the sort of tracking that a version control system does.

E.g. today I am looking at some saved output files, that I copied from a path I got in email a while back.

But I forgot to record the provenance.  I.e. I forgot to record where I got them from.

It sure would be nice if the fgilsystem remembered that, a few weeks back, I did

   cp -R jffggghggh here

to get this data.

--

Just recording the commands might be useful.

Full versioning may not be necessary.

--

Ultimately: log everything?

Apart from the privacy and big brother implications, the real problem with logging everything is the query system.  Just recording all of your commands is NOT very useful, is hard to query.

Want to record, e.g. that command


   cp -R jffggghggh here


executing in directyory a/aa/h/g

produced file here/b/h

...


Hmm... this is the sort of thing that the automatic build systems do.





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