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Steams Of Code
time to read 2 min | 231 words
How many of you are aware of an NTFS feature called Streams? It means that the files are basically directories with a default file (named $DATA, IIRC), but you can also access them by appending a ":" and a name.
Try running notepad test.txt:something, and see what happens.
This feature was originally intended for use for file serving for Macs, but it has turned out to be very useful for all sorts of things. Thumbnails are the prime example for that, but Windows uses it for remembering that files are from the Internet and are not to be trusted, to store meta data, etc.
The interesting thing that I was thinking about was to allow IDEs to store information about the code in steams. The problem is that nearly all developer tools are directed toward text usage. This is nice most of the time, but if I want to annotate the code with some diagram, that isn't very helpful. (For instance, point out a performace problem by pointing a red arrow at it, etc).
This is possible to do with streams, and non of the current tools will be wiser for it. The problem is that Subversion doesn't support it, (although is support something similar, which isn't integrated into the OS, sadly).
I would hazzard a guess and say that none of the other source control management tools support this.
Try running notepad test.txt:something, and see what happens.
This feature was originally intended for use for file serving for Macs, but it has turned out to be very useful for all sorts of things. Thumbnails are the prime example for that, but Windows uses it for remembering that files are from the Internet and are not to be trusted, to store meta data, etc.
The interesting thing that I was thinking about was to allow IDEs to store information about the code in steams. The problem is that nearly all developer tools are directed toward text usage. This is nice most of the time, but if I want to annotate the code with some diagram, that isn't very helpful. (For instance, point out a performace problem by pointing a red arrow at it, etc).
This is possible to do with streams, and non of the current tools will be wiser for it. The problem is that Subversion doesn't support it, (although is support something similar, which isn't integrated into the OS, sadly).
I would hazzard a guess and say that none of the other source control management tools support this.
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