[Owncloud] Version Control Ideas/Issues

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 14.10.2011, at 17:11, mail at samtuke.com wrote:

> On Friday 14 October 2011 14:41:48 Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
>> So using git or something similar for some files and some other mechanism
>> like  rsync for other files sounds like a resonable concept to me.
> 
> In the first VCS implementation just tracking non-binary files seems like a good 
> idea. A solution for large binaries can be added afterwards, but the most 
> obvious need related to non-binary.
> 
> Git would be a good choice in terms of speed, merge logic and flexible repo 
> relationships, but due to the complexity in configuring it, maybe  it would be 
> worth sacrificing those features for a simpler VCS which would require less 
> complex resolutions when issues arise. Most owncloud users wont have a hope of 
> personalising their VCS configuration if they have to learn Git first.
> 
> Or do you think that it will be possible to implement git as the non-binary 
> VCS backend in owncloud in a way that is totally transparent to the user and 
> will never require direct configuration? If a user wants to do anything other 
> than the VCS than use it within Owncloud then surely git will start posing 
> major problems.

Thats the idea. We should integrate a vcs directly into the ownCloud filesystem abstraction library. So the user can just use the existing, webinterface, webdav or syncing client without the need to know that there is a vcs in use.
Every file save automatically creates a new revision. ownCloud should be intelligent enough to detect that it´s running out of disk space and automatically kill the oldest revisions. This might be a tricky feature because normal vcs used for coding don´t need this.
The only way to access old revisions for rollbacks is the webinterface. Later we could also support the WebDAV versioning feature but this is not that important because most webdav client don´t support this anyways.

It is important that don´t add additional dependencies to ownCloud so we have to use a vcs which is implemented in pure php. There is at least a simple git implementation in php which might be good enough.


Cheers
Frank




> Sam.
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Frank Karlitschek
karlitschek at kde.org