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We're pleased to announce the first release of a unioning file system
for Linux, called Unionfs.  To download software and documentation,
see

	<http://unionfs.filesystems.org/>

Unionfs is a stackable unification file system, which can appear to merge
the contents of several directories (branches), while keeping their physical
content separate.  Unionfs is useful for unified source tree management,
merged contents of split CD-ROM, merged separate software package
directories, data grids, and more.  Unionfs allows any mix of read-only and
read-write branches, as well as insertion and deletion of branches anywhere
in the fan-out.  To maintain Unix semantics, Unionfs handles elimination of
duplicates, partial-error conditions, and more.  This release also includes
additional preliminary features that were specifically designed for security
applications, such as snapshotting and sandboxing.

This package contains user level utilities unionctl, unionimap and uniondbg
used to control and debug a unionfs mount. Also the same functionality is
provided in the form of a shared library.

Unionfs is released under the GPL (see the COPYING file in the distribution
for details).

For more information on using the utils and the shared library, download the
tarball and have a look at the relevant man pages.


For more information about Unionfs internals (which we think are really cool
:-), see the following technical report at the above Web site:

  C. P. Wright, J. Dave, P. Gupta, H. Krishnan, E. Zadok, and M. Zubair
  "Versatility and Unix Semantics in a Fan-Out Unification File System"
  Technical Report FSL-04-01b, October 2004
  Computer Science Department, Stony Brook University
  http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/docs/unionfs-tr/unionfs.pdf

In addition, you can find an article in Linux Journal (December 2004 issue)
titled "Unionfs: Bringing File Systems Together."  It is available online at
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7714.

To report bugs, please email them to the "unionfs@filesystems.org" list (see
www.filesystems.org), or submit them via Bugzilla to
https://bugzilla.filesystems.org/.  But reports with fixes are most welcome.

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