Re: menus

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

thristian@atdot.org wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Nov 30, 1999 at 04:32:43PM -0800, David K. Every wrote:
> 
> Secondly, one of the great attractions DOS had for me, which Windows95 largely
> broke was that it was more or less a WYSIWYG file system - that is, nothing was
> virtual, nothing was an artifact of the OS: if it was there when you typed DIR,
> then it was an entry in the directory of the filesystem, and vice versa.
> Windows95, and to a lesser extent Unix natively, tend to hide things. Windows
> likes to hide extensions and various important files, and for example all of
> /proc is a fiction. The net effect on me is that I feel I'm interacting with a
> thin veneer - not unlike the lack of sensation one feels while wearing rubber
> gloves. I much prefer to have more direct control.

I think you're making that Win95/Unix comparison a bit too offhandedly. 
Here's where that comparison falls down:

1. The file system in Unix is not just a place to store files, it is
Unix's name space.  ("Everything in Unix is a file.")  The fact that
that namespace also happens to contain actual disk files doesn't take
away from the fact that it contains many other OS objects as well. 
Would you like Unix as much if it didn't have named pipes, or the /dev
tree, or symlinks?  None of these are files. [1]

2. Win9x hides filename extensions, by default.  This is because they've
always been intended as a separate field: from the earliest days of DOS,
it gave you 8 characters for the actual file name, and 3 characters for
the file type.  In Win9x, they just took that fact to its logical
conclusion.  The file extension is only there for the user's
information, and should never change.  Since we're displaying the file
type with icons and a "type" column in the Details view, the extension
is not helpful to the user, it just confuses them, and it's one more
thing they can break.

I happen to agree in principle with that design element of Win9x; I
would even support it as a default-off option in gmc.  On the other
hand, I keep file name extensions turned on on all my Windows systems
because some programs insist on doing confusing things.  InstallShield
is a prime example: setup.exe, setup.inf and setup.bmp all appear in
InstallShield media sets, in the same directory.

3. If anything, DOS's file system was just that: a simple file storage
system.  That's not bad or good: it just is.  Win9x is the same way. 
The difference with Win9x is that Explorer mangles the appearance of
objects in that file system.  Again, I'm fine with that as far as
extension hiding goes.  But there are worse problems: A fine example is
that with newer versions of Internet Explorer, a phantom "browser cache"
folder appears under the Windows directory, but if you go into DOS, it
really isn't there.  

A lesser sin is Win98 and Win2K's hiding of the System and Program Files
folders, respectively.  Explorer will still show them to you if you
insist, but by default it hides them.  These OSes do this because they
have no security.  (Win98 by design, Win2K Professional by default.)  In
order to keep the users from mangling the file system, they just hide
the vulnerable parts; this is a form of security through obscurity. 
Unix handles the same problem with real security: For J. Random User on
a Unix box, "rm -rf /usr" is literally just a waste of time.

In short, I think Unix's file system is just fine.

Footnotes:

[1] Yes, I know that all three examples have objects stored on disk that
correspond to the names we see in the file system, but those are just
representations: the actual objects are no more "actual files" than
/proc entries are.
-- 
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m