[Discuss] Versioning File Systems

[Richard Pieri]

On May 4, 2012, at 7:06 PM, MBR wrote:
> 
> One of the possible changes you might make to your codebase is to delete or rename a file.  Git will track that.  In a versioning filesystem, doesn't that cause all the versions of the file to get deleted or renamed?

That depends on how you phrase your DELETE command.  Say you have FOO.TXT, FOO.TXT;1, FOO.TXT;2.  If you "DELETE FOO.*" then all versions will be deleted.  If you "DELETE FOO.TXT" then only the most recent version will be deleted (the most recent version has no version number).  If you "DELETE FOO.TXT;1" then the oldest version will be deleted (VMS file versions start with 1 as I recall).  If you "DELETE FOO.TXT;*" then all of the old versions will be deleted but the most recent version will be kept because it doesn't match the wildcard.

Versioning isn't revision control.  Revision control isn't versioning.  There is some overlap in what they do but they aren't the same thing.

--Rich P.