Is this right?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Vincent Ladeuil writes:

 > I see a hole but nothing to fill it :-/ The publisher pulled the
 > plug without notice to anyone, even bzr !

Well, yes, "su -c 'rm -rf /'" is not something that most systems can
protect themselves from, it even worked on Stanley Kubrick's HAL.  Of
course the system needs to be responsibly administered.

To make this as painless as possible, what is really needed is a bzrfs
(or perhaps a vcfs into which you can drop $VCS du jour).  (Not my
idea, I first heard this one from John Plaice of "TeX/Omega" fame in
1997, and you could probably trace it back to Ted Nelson if you try
hard enough.)  This would hook into the OS and turn "mv" into "bzr
mv", etc.  A robust implementation ain't gonna happen soon, so we will
need human admins for a while.<wink>

But what we want to avoid is a situation where we make *clients*
responsible for tracking *server* admin decisions.  This just doesn't
scale.  So yes, it's "nice"[1] to make an announcement if you terminate
an URL, but that's not anywhere near sufficient, and there are already
ways to do what is more important: automatically redirect.


Footnotes: 
[1]  And being nice *is* important, BOFH mythology not withstanding.