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.

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Just recording the commands might be useful.

Full versioning may not be necessary.

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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.

One-liners considered dangerous

It is nice to come up with one-liners.  E.g. today I was looking for a one-liner hg post-clone hook.

But... even when you can find a one-liner, oftentimes you give up error checking or good error messages to get it. Or, you might create something fraguke, that only works on the input you happened to have seen today, when generalizing it even a little bit is easy, but would make it more than one line.

I wonder if one liners are a source of security bugs?