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

[Jan-Erik Soderholm]

Den 2017-07-24 kl. 21:41, skrev 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.

Of course. And the file version in VMS has little to do with
version *control*, of course.

> 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,...

It still gives larger benefits than issues.

> as compared with alternative approaches.

What you descibe below solves other needs. Like application
version and release management. That has very little with
file versions as implemented in VMS to do.

> 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.
> 
>