Re: app-encapsulation and transparent-install (MS is doing it)

[Stefan Skoglund <hlz522w tninet se>]

At 18:55 1998-09-04 -0700, David Jeske wrote:
>
>For example, if you launched "Netscape" and it didn't have it on your
>machine, it would traverse up a set of application servers to find it,
>and pull it down to your machine. If you later needed space for some
>other app, and it just absolutly had to, it could remove netscape from
>your disk, knowing that it could just regrab the same files off the
>network server later.
>

This look very like the way AFS and now Coda works.
The difference is that they are intended to work well in 
a normal UNIX file-system hierarchy.

Both thoose work with aggressive cacheing and in the case
of Coda works well even then losing the connection
to the server.

I'm a little into GNU Hurd.
In the Hurd we have the concept of translators.
You could for example have one /gnome translator.
When doing ls /xbin you should get a listing of all gnome-fied
application. The file-manager should of course show their icons instead.

It is even possible to exec("/gnome/fs") or something like that.
Why ? because the translator implement the lookup routines.
This also works if the application is accessed from an Sun NFS
server.