re: gnome

[Todd Showalter <todd altsoftware com>]

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, <attribution unknown> wrote:

> Does all the unixes that have gnome support have the ability to use
> modules?
> Could there be a VFS virtual file system module produced for Linux,
> Solaris, whatever, to allow virtual filesystem code to be the same? The
> module on each os would be different reflecting the differences between
> os's but the VFS module will talk to VFS librarys that are coded exactly
> the same way. If somthing like this is done a program wont have to be
> spacificly programmed to work with VFS. It just asks the os for a file.

    This seems like overcomplicating things to me; the OS handles the file
systems.  There's no advantage to wrapping the ANSI I/O calls, and you 
suffer huge disadvantages:

- portability becomes more problematic
- complexity of the system increases without offering anything new
- additional indirection level and associated code will slow speed things
  down, and will increase the general size of the system

> Example : 
> KERNEL:
> Filesystems, Ext2, msdos, vfat, iso9660, vfs
> then the vfs filesystem has its own filesystems
> ftp, tar, whatever.

    This strikes me as "if you have a hammer, everything tends to look
like a nail".  gnome does not seem the right place to solve this problem
to me.  If you want ftp wrapped in a filesystem, try to get it into the
kernel of the OS you use.  If you want to be able to mount a tar file (or
a gzipped tar file, for that matter) as a filesystem, try to get it into
the kernel of the OS you use.

    The kernel is the place to solve this kind of thing.  I'm not running
gnome when I telnet into one of my servers, but I might want to be able to
use the above systems.  Filesystem wrapping like this should be available
even when I'm not running in X (or what have you).  Restricting it to
gnome is not desirable.

							Todd.  

--
Todd Showalter       |  "The time has come," the Walrus said,
                     |    "to talk of many things:"
gandalf@interlog.com |
todd@altsoftware.com |                            Lewis Carroll