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Ask Slashdot: If You Could Assemble a "FrankenOS" What Parts Would You Use?
rnws writes: While commenting about log-structured file systems in relation to flash SSDs, I referenced Digital's Spiralog [pdf], released for OpenVMS in 1996. This got me thinking about how VMS to this day has some of, if not the best storage clustering (still) in use today. Many operating systems have come and gone over the years, particularly from the minicomputer era, and each usually had something unique it did really well. If you could stitch together your ideal OS, then which "body parts" would you use from today and reanimate from the past? I'd probably start with VMS's storage system, MPE's print handling, OS/2's Workplace Shell, AS/400's hardware abstraction and GNU's Bash shell. What would you choose?
What are these parts I keep hearing about? I use systemd.
Windows kernel, Linux UI.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
VMS supports very elegant file versioning, which I found a very useful feature. By default, every time you open a file for write (and you modify the file) you get a new version of the file (kind of like copy on write at the file level). When you list the files in a directory, you can see all the versions of the file with the version number being an actual part of the file name(file.text;1, file.text;2). On a per file basis you can set how many versions you want to keep around and the file system will automatically purge the old versions as new ones are created. When opening a file you can specify any version you want, or if you don't specify a version you just get the latest.
The file system also supports specific backup related attributes that integrate with the backup system. This lets you specify that a file should be excluded from backup and if I recall, tracks if the file has been modified since the last backup.