Re: Request: Test suite for EFS.

[Mike Bond <mike bond template com>]

For the 'average' user, the EFS files are just going to be another 
proprietary binary file format, they are not going to care that it is a 
filesystem within a file. Someone will eventually want to send an email 
with their spiffy new spreadsheet that shows the question to the answer 
to the universe, life, and everything as an attachment. A directory 
would make this very frustrating for this user as this user is just 
going to select the "document", send the email, and get a response from 
the recipient that the email contained nothing.

EFS has advantages over the other proposed formats in that it will be 
time efficient in saving/loading, but filesystems in a file have the 
disadvantage of occasionally have ununsed spots where things have been 
replaced but the replacement wouldn't fit, disks are big though, and 
most of these dead spots can be minimized. I like the idea of providing 
utilities to extract the data, and yes, if we used the zip format, this 
would be done for us, but zip does not handle dead space as efficiently 
as possible, in fact not really at all, and I'm not really sure this 
tasks requires the compression, or would even really provide sufficient 
benifit from having the compression given that one of the objectives is 
to provide a mechanism to tie images and other pre-compressed things to 
documents.

Just my two cents.

TTFN
MikeB

Application development is a race between software engineers who
try to create fool proof programs and the universe which is trying to
develop superior fools.
	
	So far, the universe is winning.
	Let's not give it any help...