# They will want it for tar(1). Immediately. And for rpm. And for all weird
# shit handled by things like mc(1). Mark my word, you will get a _huge_
# recurring flamewar on hands. With joint letters begging to put file(1)
# into the kernel. Let's leave that to userland. Really. "mark foo as a
# tarfs fodder" - sure. Will do wonders in filemanagers. Putting that
# into the kernel... Not too pleasant.
Well...wouldn't it be possible to implement a generic 'filefs' modular
interface? i.e., everything for handling the pseudo-filesystem gets put
into a module which has an API that doesn't change very often at all (or
at least, is nicely backward compatible), and doesn't need to be compiled
at the same as the kernel itself.
I could envisage a user being able to do something like:
$ rpm -ivh rpmfs.rpm
rpmfs-1.4 ################################
$ ls foo.rpm
You get the idea (I'm assuming here that the RPM post-install script
automatically loaded the module, although in practice this probably
wouldn't happen - I can almost hear the cries of horror :)
# As for the GNOME looking nice...
Well, it *looks* nice. There's still an awful lot of consistency issues
that are inevitable when all the applications are written by a bunch of
different people. This, unfortunately, is where the standard Windows
desktop wins hands down - despite it's faults - everything is consisent,
and to the new user, doesn't take long to get used to (Ya, I know moving
between different versions of Windows does strange things to you,
but...). That said, CDE does a bloody good job in this respect, too
(although the desktop takes new users slightly longer to get to grips
with).
Things will change in time, though, I hope. The folks at Corel and
Mandrake, et al, all have their own ideas about how "end-user
Linux" should work, and for the most part are moving in the right
direction. Things are looking good for Linux on the desktop, I think, all
in all..
-- Mo McKinlay Chief Software Architect inter/open Labs ------------------------------------------------------------------------- GnuPG Key: pub 1024D/76A275F9 2000-07-22 Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay@gnu.org>- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 15 2000 - 21:00:29 EST