Copy-on-write for develop

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

I'm doing some initial thinking about how I want the Develop activity to
work. I'd like it to start out with write access to a shallow (file-linked)
copy of the activity's whole directory, and then if there are any writes,
start up source control. I'm not an expert on file systems, though, so I
don't know how easy this scheme is. Is copy-on-write link breaking supported
on JFFS2? I google the ideas and I get a lot about the JFFS2 internals,
which do support COW, but nothing about whether that's accessible outside
the OS.

Does anyone know if it is possible for Sugar to support something like this?
That is, if it there's any way - either file-system-native or through some
strap-on - to safely hand a link to a process so that (either magically or
manually) it can replace the link with a local copy if needed, but it CANNOT
modify the original file?

Jameson
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