Re: Hypothetical design question

[der Mouse <mouse () Rodents Montreal QC CA>]

> You might be interested in a paper that was presented/published
> [...].  The idea was to create a transaction approach for running
> programs.  When you run a program, it creates a copy-on-write version
> of every file that gets modified, [...]

This sounds related to a project I worked on for the second half of
2002 at the University of Tromsø.  I don't know where (or, actually,
even whether) it's been published about, but among other things it
supports such semantics: modifying a file is not done by writing over
the current contents, but by creating a new version of the file, with
all versions related in a tree structure.  (Some of the versions may no
longer have their contents saved anywhere, to be sure.)  The semantics
are a poor match to the Unix filesystem semantics, and impedance
matching between them was a major part of my work there, but provided
you can avoid getting stuck in the Unix mold, it's very interesting.

If you want to find out more about it, http://www.pasta.cs.uit.no/ is
the place I'd suggest starting.

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