Hammer gets versioned

Matthew Dillon is adding versioning support to Hammer; it’ll support in-place version upgrading.  The gory details of his current plan are available, with an interesting tidbit: Hammer directory lookups remain the same speed even with 2 billion files in a directory, while UFS will be O(N^3) speed after several hundred thousand.

More links 2008/11/12

I have a number of things to link which probably can all go together:

A way to learn git

Since DragonFly is switching to git instead of CVS, something handy is ‘eg’, or Easy Git. It’s a wrapper around git that makes the transition from CVS easier, or so it says. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd) The linked page lists some alternate programs that are also designed to make git acclimation easier.

Automatic PFS creation

Michael Neumann has come up with a way to automatically create pseudo file systems (PFS) when mirroring a Hammer volume.  Previously, the destination/slave file system would have to be created first; this makes it Just Work.

This means Hammer data streams will be incompatible with versions before and after this change, but it’s not going to damage anything.  Introducing a versioning system into Hammer data streams is an available project…

10 years of textfiles

txtfiles.com is having its 10th anniversary.  Read up on Jason Scott’s history, which parallels the development of computer and the Internet for a lot of people (myself included), and then waste your afternoon browsing through all the data he has saved.  If I had encountered something like this at 14 on my local BBS, it would have been amazing.  For fun, look at the Hacking UNIX section, or perhaps Programming.  (via)