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Re: [Nano-devel] questions about uniquely numbered backups
From: |
Benno Schulenberg |
Subject: |
Re: [Nano-devel] questions about uniquely numbered backups |
Date: |
Sun, 03 May 2015 13:50:06 +0200 |
On Tue, Apr 28, 2015, at 22:52, Mark Majeres wrote:
> Maybe there is a better algorithm for generating a unique ID?
> Wouldn't using the system time, to the nearest second, be sufficient?
That would be an idea. But it would be a user-visible change:
whoever uses this backup feature will hate us changing the
naming scheme. So I don't want to go there. (Also: Emacs
uses a similar ordinal numbering scheme, but it is cleverer
about it: by default it will keep only the first two and the
last two of these numbered backups. (It is also cleverer
about making a normal, unnumbered backup: it will make a
backup only the first time you save a file. In nano, when
you do ^O <Enter> twice, the backup and the current file
will have identical contents; which is pointless.))
On Wed, Apr 29, 2015, at 03:40, Eitan Adler wrote:
> If nano dosn't do this already, it should start sharding files into
> multiple directories inside the backup store. Having millions of
> files in a single directory will result in slowness regardless of the
> algorithm used to generate filenames.
Hmmm... no. Sharding is not a responsibility of nano. If people
really want to keep thousands of backup files, they should implement
a sharding scheme themselves. Emacs doesn't do sharding (nor does
it need to, because it deletes the pointless in-between backups),
and Vim isn't even able to make numbered backups, as far as I can
tell.
At first I thought to make nano stop at one hundred or one thousand
backups, to make the user aware that he is doing something silly:
what is he going to do with one hundred versions of the same file,
each a little different from the earlier one? If it is intended as
a primitive kind of version control, well, then a hundred thousand
possible versions should be more than enough.
Benno
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