Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 14 Aug 2000 00:07:53 -0400 (EDT) | From | Alexander Viro <> | Subject | Re: NTFS-like streams? |
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On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
> > Sigh... And then somebody sets "fascist" (read: reasonable) permissions > > and that program breaks. Right? > > On Windows 2000, you can create an attribute with any name and as many > of them as you want. When you open the file, you access the attribute
"You"? What does it mean on multi-user OS?
> > Come on, guys, it's a feature from the Lisp Machines land. Single-user > > environment. Yep, having P-list stored with the object is handy, but it > > has _nothing_ to the things usually considered as filesystems. And it > > certainly doesn't work with multi-user systems. Linux is not Genera. > > I must be too obtuse to understand this analogy. > > :-)
Umm... Quite a few LISP interpreters are using the following data structure: list of pairs <name, arbitrary value>. Normally such a beast is associated with every name and is used to store the stuff like "value of variable", "definition of function", etc. It is often used to represent an equivalent of structures and objects (as in "OOP"), BTW. P in P-list stands for properties. When all your environment is written in LISP... Well, idea of persistent storage for such beasts becomes very natural. That's where this stuff came from. Yes, you can have your whole OS/GUI/IDE in LISP. Proof: Genera. Nice beast, but... absolutely unsuitable as a multiuser system. Having that _under_ multiuser OS (with less archaic functional language at core) would be wonderful. But it would be per-user thing and its storage would _live_ on filesystem, not _be_ a shared filesystem. I would certainly like to have such an animal as a desktop...
Trying to force the forks into the OS built on fundamentally different ideas is just plain silly. Making them visible to the hosting OS as a bunch of filesystem objects? Sure, why not. But trying to bend the filesystem semantics just to make them look like single fs objects... Damn stupid.
BTW, the desktop crowd would do much better if they would start with making the X objects hierarchy visible as a userland fs. That would allow much simpler integration of CLI stuff and normal programs in general. Filesystem is The API on UNIX and all UNIX userland is built to work with it. Exporting your functionality via that API rather than inventing incompatible kludery would be really nice thing. Sigh...
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