Re: some thoughts.. on OS/2... [WAS: Re: some thoughts..]

[Josh Sled <jsled scam XCF Berkeley EDU>]

This is long, and probably mostly off-topic... read at your own risk.

Summary:
"Yes, we should look at a lot of what OS/2 did, because it ruled... but in
terms of objects, and not in terms of a file management interface."


| I'd like to see the file manager not be too cluttered.  MacOS, for 
| example, has a great way of making things look messy OR ugly.  I think we 
| should look at what OS/2 does for its file manager.

We should look at a lot of what OS/2 does [or, did]... it's WorkPlace Shell
was very powerful and cool... some might say k-rad...

Most of that coolness was in the desktop objects...  the concept
of a Folder object which can hold other [perhaps not file-system] objects
is useful... however, in gnome at the moment, there's don't seem to be much
more than file-system objects... and they're not even framed as "objects".

Unfortunately, the default OS/2 "file manager" was really an extension of the
object manager.  Directories were mapped to the generic Folder object, and
unknown file types to the file object, which was a pretty boring object.
But, you could still ascribe your favorite programs to be opened to deal
with the plain file object, so you could have any ascii or hex file viewer
started on files that the WPS didn't have more info about...  gmc [which
I haven't been able to try, yet] seems to support some notion of associating
programs with file types based on extension [which was one way of doing
it in OS/2]... I sure hope so, because this was very enabling...

The default OS/2 object manager worked [ie: was useable] as a file manager
for folders containing small numbers of objects, but when you really wanted
to do file-manipulation, it was too limited and not nearly full-featured
enough...  since it was dealing with generic collections of objects and not
really Files, Directories, etc...  it didn't have all sorts of cool
file manager features...  so one was required to start another file
manger-type program to deal with things.  A lot of people apparently used
the default Folder objects for file and directory manipulation, but I found
it very limited.

Especially since it defaulted to an icon view, which is not really useful for
manipulating large collections of files... and it was kind of a pain to
go around changing it every time it popped up an icon view which should
have been a details view.

Basically, I'm saying that it's more useful to have a real file manager
which is seperate from an object manager... especially since gnome doesn't
seem to have a lot of support for explicit non-file-system objects.

But, a real object manager and real non-file-system objects [Program objects,
Printer objects, System settings objects, etc.] are useful too... for instance,
the Describe [an OS/2 word processor] document objects were able to print
themselves without have to open the file in Describe and select File|Print...
either just right-click on the file to bring up it's context menu and select
print, or drag the Describe document to the printer object, and it would do
so... This is where we should look at OS/2, if anywhere... an IDL [IBM used
SOM, we have CORBA] is useful to make these links between typed documents
and program interals.

I strongly believe that gnome could benefit from looking at OS/2 for ideas...
while, at the same time, it shouldn't become a clone of OS/2 WorkPlace
Shell...  which did have it's own problems...

...jsled