Accessing historical versions of the cloud copy of the dive log

[Dirk Hohndel]

For quite a long time I had this desire to implement a simple "walk back" feature in Subsurface.
But as always - I have no time. I barely have time to do the things I need to do in order to keep maintaining this project. And in the last couple of months, arguably I haven't even had that amount of time.
I think I mentioned this before - I foolishly decided a couple of years ago to work with a builder to get a custom house built for my family... three weeks ago that got completed and we moved... and the month before and the time since have been... challenging as far as finding time to do fun things - like dealing with Subsurface releases, ideas for things that I want to add to it are so far down the list, it's not even funny.

That said, I think the worst is over (famous last words) and also I have a dive trip coming up in a week, so there's a chance that I will emerge from hiatus. 
Which means that hopefully we'll be able to inch closer to 4.9.
And after that, maybe this is the fun thing I decide to do (and drive poor Berthold crazy because I'm sure that the simplistic idea that I have in mind will completely wreak havoc with the day-to-day much more useful undo mechanism that he has been building.

/D

> On Jun 17, 2019, at 1:20 PM, Willem Ferguson <willemferguson at zoology.up.ac.za> wrote:
> 
> On 2019/06/17 20:38, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 12:24 PM Willem Ferguson
>> <willemferguson at zoology.up.ac.za> wrote:
>>> For data security when something wrong has happened to a dive log, it
>>> would be invaluable if one could request "Open die dive log as it was on
>>> October 1st 2018". Is something like this in principle possible with
>>> git?
>> Git can maintain a per-branch log of when things changed, but libgit2
>> (which we use) does not.
>> 
>> Also, even if it were to be there, it's per-repository and doesn't get
>> distributed out to the cloud (because by definition the dates when
>> something happened are local - what you saw in one repo back in
>> October might have showed up in another repository much later).
>> 
>> So the date-based one is not going to be much of an option, although I
>> guess we could add some way for people to at least see *when* some git
>> commit was made.
>> 
>> 
>>                 Linus
>> 
> Linus,
> 
> Thank you very much. You answered my question comprehensively. I have many things to think about.
> 
> One of the (quite a few) things that differentiates Subsurface from other equivalent software is the usage of a git repository as a dive log. It is not just another data format, comparable to XML or CSV. git is a whole infrastructure that strengthens dive log security immensely. And once  a diver has passed the 100 dive mark I would expect that data security is becoming an issue and the ability to recover from a stupid mistake or oversight is possible with git. I guess the rhetorical  question is how could one make git work for a user who is not very computer savvy? And the answer to that question looks like "Yes, but it would require an enormous coding effort". I am pretty impressed with the ability to use Subsurface to open the dive log at a specific commit. I am going to try that one.
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> willem
> 
> 
> 
> 
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