Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 13 Aug 2000 04:50:04 +0100 (GMT) | From | Mo McKinlay <> | Subject | Re: NTFS-like streams? |
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# They will want it for tar(1). Immediately. And for rpm. And for all weird # shit handled by things like mc(1). Mark my word, you will get a _huge_ # recurring flamewar on hands. With joint letters begging to put file(1) # into the kernel. Let's leave that to userland. Really. "mark foo as a # tarfs fodder" - sure. Will do wonders in filemanagers. Putting that # into the kernel... Not too pleasant.
Well...wouldn't it be possible to implement a generic 'filefs' modular interface? i.e., everything for handling the pseudo-filesystem gets put into a module which has an API that doesn't change very often at all (or at least, is nicely backward compatible), and doesn't need to be compiled at the same as the kernel itself.
I could envisage a user being able to do something like:
$ rpm -ivh rpmfs.rpm rpmfs-1.4 ################################ $ ls foo.rpm
You get the idea (I'm assuming here that the RPM post-install script automatically loaded the module, although in practice this probably wouldn't happen - I can almost hear the cries of horror :) # As for the GNOME looking nice...
Well, it *looks* nice. There's still an awful lot of consistency issues that are inevitable when all the applications are written by a bunch of different people. This, unfortunately, is where the standard Windows desktop wins hands down - despite it's faults - everything is consisent, and to the new user, doesn't take long to get used to (Ya, I know moving between different versions of Windows does strange things to you, but...). That said, CDE does a bloody good job in this respect, too (although the desktop takes new users slightly longer to get to grips with).
Things will change in time, though, I hope. The folks at Corel and Mandrake, et al, all have their own ideas about how "end-user Linux" should work, and for the most part are moving in the right direction. Things are looking good for Linux on the desktop, I think, all in all..
-- Mo McKinlay Chief Software Architect inter/open Labs ------------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Key: pub 1024D/76A275F9 2000-07-22 Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay@gnu.org>
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