On 3/15/07, Trans <transfire / gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 14, 9:07 pm, "Austin Ziegler" <halosta... / gmail.com> wrote:
> > People say that distributed systems have cheap branching, but I find
> > that very hard to believe, since (at least in the ones that I've
> > tried, and I have a hard time imagining how others would differ) the
> > branches are physical copies in a different location. That's cheap for
> > the making, yes, but your total storage cost goes up (since none of
> > the advantages of having a single repository can be found) and it then
> > becomes possible to *lose* branches from your repository (cf fragility
> > above).
> I have actually given that some thought. While not the case presently,
> I think eventually this will become a mute point. Ultimately file
> systems themselves will manage data redundancy. I think of it as
> "holographic" memory. I don't know why exactly as it has nothing much
> to do with actual holographs, but it sounds cool ;-)

As someone who works in the storage and backup industry, it will not
be a moot point.

> For fun I started writing a version control system in Ruby just to get
> a better understanding of the concepts. Turns out not to be so hard
> really --at least for a simple model.

That's actually what people think; it isn't, in fact, as simple as
people think it is once you start scaling. Git works for Linux because
it fits that specific development model. Other systems generally have
to be more flexible.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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