[Info-vax] Is there a way to enabling versioning in Samba

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2017-07-21 03:31:09 +0000, David Froble said:

> don.zong at gmail.com wrote:
>> My impression with Samba is that the file is always overridden, no 
>> versioning. revision number might change though. Wondering if there is 
>> a way to enable versioning in Samba - so that whenever there is a 
>> change in the file, it will create a new file with a new version.
> 
> My impression is that you're asking the wrong question.
> 
> When using Samba, you're accessing files on a VMS system from an OS 
> that doesn't have versioning in it's file system.  So, how then would 
> the other OS know anything about versions?  Yes, you possibly could 
> fudge it in Samba.  I'm thinking that that might lead to more problems 
> than it might solve.


My impression is that the file system is the wrong tool for most sorts 
of version control.   The OpenVMS file version implementation was a 
great idea in the 1970s and 1980s, and it saved me more than a few 
hassles back then.   Now it's a hassle to maintain it, as compared with 
alternative approaches.  Maybe a DVCS (Fossil, Mercurial, git, etc.) 
for whatever the particular goal here might be?   Or if the goal is 
recovery and backups, versions are rather a hassle to restore a matched 
set, and macOS (and likely other systems) have both versioning and 
backups integrated, and these and other newer approaches avoid having 
to maintain or purge or the rest.


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