Time Slider in Caja

[vermaden]

Hi,

this is kinda rather 'feature proposal' then 'issue'.

On OpenIndiana there is a feature implemented in Caja called Time Slider - to show various ZFS snapshots in file manager:

As Ubuntu comes these days with ZFS, Linux Mate comes with ZFS, it will be also useful on GhostBSD as it also comes with Mate and uses ZFS - it would be nice to have such feature in Caja file manager - or maybe as Caja extension.

I believe someone already ported it to Linux here:

• https://github.com/Lalufu/time-slider

It may be a good starting point.

Just an idea.

Regards,
vermaden

[lukefromdc]

Note that there are licensing (and Oracle) issues with ZFS, so I suspect few distros are ever going to install to it by default. Thus, we'd have a time slider only useful with a file system most users will never see. We'd also get bug reports from users wondering why the time slider is greyed out or not working in a default install (usually to ext4). As of 2020, Linus Torvalds was actively preventing ZFS from being merged into the kernel itself as insurance against harassment by Oracle's lawyers. Thus, I don't see us implementing this unless other team members disagree. I myself will not be working on ZFS.

[vermaden]

Do not mess OpenZFS with Oracle ZFS - these are two different things - its the same thing Linus did.

[lukefromdc]

I have no plans to work on either one

[lukefromdc]

More generally I putting features into the filemanager that only work with a filesystem other than what most distros default to does not strike me as a good idea.

[vermaden]

Sure, just a proposal.

[lukefromdc]

I will leave this open in case its anything other team members want to work on.

[cwendling]

I don't plan on working on this either, but if it was more FS-agnostic it could possibly support btrfs snapshots as well? I have not idea how either work in practice though :)

[vermaden]

There is also 'similar' project with focus not only on ZFS but also on other filesystems - linuxmint/timeshift#56 (comment) - maybe You can join your forces :)

It has RSYNC mode, it has BTRFS mode and maybe ZFS mode will be added.