Re: PROPOSAL: GNOME Volume Manager for GNOME 2.8

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 20:01:28 +0100, Sander Vesik wrote:
> So why not use a standard packing mechanism like say zip, especially as everyby s
> realistcly going to have zlib mapped anyways instead of creating a new packing
> format? 

While you can have uncompress zip files support for the format in free
software is not great and it doesn't deal with things like alignment
and so on. The packed files can just be mapped and used directly.

One thing that does concern me is that we seem to be hacking around
problems with the filing system. Why isn't there any way to mark a
directory as "grouped" which asks the filing system to put all files in
that directory into a single "run" on the disk consecutively. You could
then ask the kernel via a new syscall or whatever to map a series of files
consecutively and you have something similar to the packer system except
you can still read/write the files using the standard APIs.

Yes I know this is probably more work and harder to get into the kernel
etc, but surely that's better than just creating filing-systems-in-a-file
because the real thing isn't up to scratch?