Re: SSD TBW

On Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:15:19 -0700, Don Y wrote:

> On 8/22/2026 6:19 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, 22 Aug 2026 18:04:48 -0700, Don Y wrote:
>>
>>> The value of version control is to be able to recreate a
>>> particular point-in-time of <whatever> you are controlling.
>>
>> Any backup/restore system can do that, surely.
>
> That is time based. You want to declare a "version" -- branch -- of
> the development and capture THAT.

Fine. Store that info as part of the metadata for the backup snapshot.

> The advantage of saving entire development system states is you
> don't have to wonder what OTHER things affect the operation of the
> tool that you need to access, again.

Yes, but again, that’s what backup snapshots are for. VCSes serve a
somewhat different purpose.

> Here's a photo of my back yard.  Here's another.  What has changed
> (please indicate that in a human-friendly form).

Here’s a photo of someone else’s back yard. It started out similar to
yours, but has undergone its own renovations. You like some of what
they’ve done, and would like to selectively apply those changes to
your own back yard, which has in its turn evolved somewhat in the
meantime. How would you do that?

> Not everything is "source code".

VCSes are best precisely at dealing with textual source code, and with
anything that can be represented as that.

> file(1) is almost WORSE than using file extensions. As with a Mac, I
> (or an application) should be definitively declaring the form and
> content of a file, instead of leaving that to something else to
> deduce or declare (possibly incorrectly)

Apple had the old “FourCC” or “OSType” type/creator system decades
ago, but abandoned all that in favour of file extensions.

These days, we have MIME types. And common Linux filesystems allow
those to be attached to files in a similar way to those type/creator
codes on the old Apple Mac systems. Except MIME types are a somewhat
more extensible system, using more descriptive strings instead of
cryptic four-byte codes.