A keystroke away from Doom.

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, Oct 19, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Chris F.A. Johnson
<chris-E7bvbYbpR6jSUeElwK9/Pw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Oct 2013, Robert Brockway wrote:
> ...
>
>> Morale: Take a copy as soon as the work you've done is worth saving - not
>> once you are done.
>
>
>    In emacs, I have (backup-every-save). Every time I save a file
>    (which is often, as it's a single keystroke), a backup copy with
>    datestamp is created in a directory on a different disc.

This suggests to me that it is regrettable that we have basically lost
touch with some of the useful features of other operating systems of
yesteryear.

The case in point is VMS, which has filesystems with not just one, but
TWO available extensions.  (Where, it should be noted, Unix has NONE.
When people talk about "file extensions" these days, they're talking
about something that doesn't exist, as Linux inherits the Unix notion
of not having any such thing.)

At any rate, a VMS file might be named
    MyScript.DCL;4
 or
    MyScript.DCL;5

which illustrates, I hope clearly enough, the notion that there was a
built-in notion of file versioning.

As Emacs was expected to run on VMS, once upon a time, it's not too
surprising that the developers were aware of the "version number"
strategy.

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question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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