RFC: Btrfs snapshots feature for F13

[Chris Ball]

Hi all,

   > It'd be great to get feedback on whether this is the right idea,
   > and how exactly the UI interaction should work, before submitting
   > this formally.

Some off-list feedback so far:

* People want independent active snapshots per filesystem (i.e. btrfs
  /home is the live filesystem, and btrfs / is an older snapshot),
  which makes sense but makes the UI more complex since it'll have
  to show a list of (filesystem, snapshot) tuples.

* Ray says not to invent a new system-config-blah, and instead to talk
  with davidz about Palimpsest.  David, what do you think?

* Several people think that the ZFS Time Slider patches to nautilus¹
  look good, and want that for btrfs.  Sounds plausible², but I'm
  personally less interested in file versioning via snapshots and
  more interested in working on ways to let developers feel
  comfortable upgrading to Rawhide daily, for the next release.

* Someone on the feature's Talk Page suggests that we should encourage
  people using anaconda to create a btrfs rootfs separate to their
  /home, so that they can rollback rootfs snapshots without affecting
  their homedir.  Could work; maybe an anaconda dialog that says "hey,
  I see you're choosing btrfs, we're going to turn on snapshots and we
  suggest you use a separate /home partition".

Any more thoughts?

Thanks!

- Chris.

¹:  http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs
    http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/time_slider_screencast
    http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/new_time_slider_features_in

²:  It's a bit awkward; you have to do a mount on each snapshot to be
    able to show the directory listing for it, but it appears that's
    what ZFS/Time Slider does already, so it won't be any worse..
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child