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Ideas for programs that don't exist: 4

This is an oc­ca­sion­al se­ries of posts where I will share ideas for pro­grams that don't ex­ist, but should. The goal is to in­spire de­vel­op­ers to cre­ate use­ful tools that can make our lives eas­i­er. Or, more like­ly, to re­mind me about these ideas so I can cre­ate them my­self. Or even more like­ly, to just get them out of my head so I can stop think­ing about them.

Idea 4: A modern version control system that has fewer features

For some things you don't need Git. But for those things you may still need ver­sion con­trol.

Imag­ine a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem just for you. Un­less you are a de­vel­op­er, in that case it's not for you, it's for your dog or some­thing.

I want a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem that is bet­ter than "doc­u­men­t.­doc" ➡️ "doc­u­men­t2.­doc" ➡️ "doc­u­men­t.­fi­nal.­doc" ➡️ "doc­u­men­t.re­al­ly­fi­nal.­doc"

Not a lot bet­ter but bet­ter.

Let's be ul­tra­op­ti­mistic and just dream of what would be ide­al.

  • Us­er cre­ates a file and says "this file is im­por­tant and will change"
  • Mag­i­cal­ly the sys­tem rec­og­nizes the idea and says "ok"
  • Us­er saves a new ver­sion of the file.
  • The sys­tem says "ok"
  • Us­er says "oop­s, where is my old ver­sion?"
  • Sys­tem says "here"

Some­times the sys­tem may al­low the us­er to see the dif­fer­ence be­tween one ver­sion and an­oth­er ver­sion. This re­quires app sup­port in gen­er­al if the file is not an or­di­nary text file.

  • Some­times the us­er may want to make a copy of an old ver­sion.
  • Some­times the us­er may want to "name" an old ver­sion.
  • Some­times the us­er will want to over­write the last ver­sion with an old­er one.
  • Some­times the us­er will want to get back a file he delet­ed.

That's it. That's all the fea­tures.

The sad part is that we had this in the 80s, in VM­S. But any­way, it would be nice.

If I were to im­ple­ment this I would do a sim­ple im­ple­men­ta­tion and then write a user-lev­el filesys­tem to let the us­er ac­cess it trans­par­ent­ly.

Fur­ther, maybe a li­brary that al­lows us­ing this from your own code? So you can save ver­sioned?

Would be nice.


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