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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/24/2017 3:41 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 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.

I think it can be rather convenient for certain types of output files.

One get multiple versions with no coding effort. And very visible
even at command line interface.

Arne