lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2000]   [Aug]   [13]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: NTFS-like streams?


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...


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:58    [W:0.157 / U:0.212 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site