On 4/7/21, Royce Mitchell III
It seems with the right vfs design you could create a command like “shadow make install” and it create a view of the file system and allow changes but those changes are stored in the shadow but not written to the actual vfs. This would allow you to do that very kind of inspection. I’ve done something like this at the application level using Python so that I could run unit tests without actually changing the file system.
It will be possible to do something like that under UX/RT because of the scoped namespace support, although the command will almost certainly require specifying a shadow directory. Actually the entire system will normally be installed with such an overlay for everything but certain embedded configurations, due to the underlying packages being treated as immutable except for adding and removing them.