Dough? (Project Dev./Filesystem "Clonelink" vision)

2014-03-31, 19:49:43

As this Subforum is called Bla & technology I think my not to describable via subject babble has to end up here:

I am currently working on some compilable script language project and by now I envisioned a filesystem where next to symbolic- and hardlinks something like a clonelink should exist. I try to avoid naming the exact script language and proprietary system I am using for my diploma now, as I do not want any discussion about that software - and the workflow problem I now have is somewhat generic as it can also be applied to similiar tasks besides scripting that includes an overall package (directory/files) structure where in testing stuff out the whole bunch of the package has to be processed, but for each trial only a few files are modified. As a prerequisite to understand my post I have to add that I always/"most of the time" work from Commandline and with Notepad2 (replace with editor of your choice) only, so I am not using any IDE or such.

And now to the"problem": I found myself now in a position where I have a stable base of the package/project folder and a work folder with a complete copy of the source. And whenever I made some changes (trial&error/revert to base) I copy files over again from the stable source to the work directory and so I am dreaming right now of a filesystem where the work directory is just made of some form of links which alike to symlinks are just pointing to the corresponding file in the stable_source folder, but once the file accessed via that "clonelink" is modified it will be written only above the "whateveryoucallitLink" (preserving the link state in an alternate stream or whatsoever) and if accessed again (by editor, compiler or whatever) it will be the workcopy that is accessed. But when the file is deleted it will become just the underlying link to the source again (of course there must be a way to delete them, with a clever system it will be automatic if the whole work directory (root of the clonelink(s)) will be deleted, or with a special delete command (alike to del and rmdir).

Whole point I am only writing this to distract me from work right now and to voice my frustration as that copy/replace stuff eats up time. Besides that I was also questioning myself If there already is some exotic (operating&|file)system which can do something like that (not that it will be of any help to me, because I am bound to win with my project. Though I am really curious about it

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Re: Dough? (Project Dev./Filesystem "Clonelink" vision)

Reply #1 – 2014-03-31, 19:59:16

Some *nixes have something like that - allow you to mount two filesystems on top of each other - directory lists show both, reads go to the upper filesystem, if the file doesn't exist there it's taken from the lower one, writes all end up in the upper.
See NetBSD's unionfs for example.