[Digikam-devel] [Bug 103350] its too easy to save images

[Martin Rehn]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103350         




------- Additional Comments From martinrehn hotpop com  2005-09-06 18:59 -------
Here is an radical, possibly stupid, suggestion. What about implementing transparent version management using ioslaves? The advantage would be that any KDE program could use it -- and need not even be aware of it.

Implementation 1: (If digiKam only allowed it, this would work today I think)

Have your Pictures directory be a "webdav:" URL that points to an  Apache/mod_dav_svn server with Autoversioning turned on. Now it should appear to digiKam that there is no version control going on, but in fact each "save" generates a new version in the server repository. Add some awareness to digiKam about how to access an old version of an image and there you have it -- full-blown version management support.

Implementation 2:

Create an ioslave that works the same way as above, except for a local subversion repository. File operations would be translated into "svn" calls. Now the Pictures directory would be "local-svn:/home/user/repository", where /home/user/repository is a subversion repository.

Implementation 3:

Create an ioslave that adds version control to any directory; saving a file through the ioslave would also copy the old version to a hidden directory. The Pictures directory would be "vc-wrapper:~Pictures". Alternatively, this could be implemented by using a separate repository and having the local directory as a working copy; however that would duplicate all the data.

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All of the above might lead to huge storage demands for the different image versions. However, subversion stores diffs efficiently (even though JPEG compression might screw that up) and most users probably don't edit their pictures that much compared to how many new pictures they add. Nevertheless, some mechanism to delete old versions would be needed.