EMFS version 1.3

This is EMFS, a poor man's redundant file system based on electronic
mail.  It keeps text files up to date across multiple sites, propagating
updates made at any site to all others for which EMFS is configured.
Its use is limited to small text files that have small changes made daily,
such as calendar files, phone and address lists, and so on.

EMFS maintains working copies and baseline copies of its data at each site.
Each site periodically compares its working copies with its baselines, mails
the differences to the other sites, and then updates its own baselines.  The
receiving sites apply the differences to their own baselines, and then
perform a three-way merge of their original baselines, their new baselines,
and their working copies.  The result is that the baselines are kept
consistent across all of the sites, and changes made at any site eventually
find their way into the baselines and are distributed to all sites.

EMFS requires a 3-way merge program like the "merge" program distributed
with RCS, Larry Wall's "patch" program, and a version of "diff" that can
produce context diffs.  (All of these programs are available from the
Free Software Foundation via popular anonymous FTP sites such as
gatekeeper.dec.com, and wuarchive.wustl.edu.)  It also works best with an
automated mail processor such as "deliver" or "procmail" installed (these
programs are available from the various Usenet sources archives on popular
anonymous FTP sites) though these are not required.  The EMFS code itself
is a collection of Bourne Shell scripts, so a Unix system is assumed.  EMFS
assumes that /bin/mail is a System V compatible mail program.

Limitations:
- It works only with text files.  Attempts to trick it into processing
  binary files by using tools like uuencode are likely to fail.
- Conflicting changes made to the data files at different sites are not
  resolved gracefully.  In such cases, EMFS notifies the user via email
  and leaves all changes in the working copies of the files.
- There is no way for an authoritative source to distribute new baselines.
- There is no way for an authoritative source to distribute a change in the
  list of files that are maintained by EMFS to remote sites.
- Small and isolated changes can be made frequently, or large changes can
  be made infrequently, but not both.

EMFS is donated to the public domain by its author, Paul Sander
(paul@sander.cupertino.ca.us).

 Name                    Last modified       Size  Description

 Parent Directory        13-Aug-2005 12:37      -  
 emfs.tar.Z              13-Aug-2005 12:36    22k