Web direction for filesystem [was Re: Some very thought-provoking ideas about OS architecture.]

Pavel Machek (pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz)
Wed, 23 Jun 1999 14:53:13 +0200


Hi!

> The real issue is _naming_, and that's not going away. The name space has
> always been the difficult part. And that's where I agree that UNIX could
> do better: I think we do want to move into a "web direction" where you can
> just do a open("http://ssss.yyyyy.dd/~silly", O_RDONLY) and it does the
> right thing.

You've just described what podfuk does. Actually, it is bad idea to
use url style (just about every unix app knows // == /), and it is bad
idea to use / as component separator in url, because "what should cd
http:// do?".

But yes I currently have open("/#url:http:||ssss.yyyyy.dd/~silly",
O_RDONLY) working. I also have chdir("/#ftp:host.name") working. And
this all in 300 lines of c code (+ midnight commander turned into
library). You want to see
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/podfuk/podfuk.html. [I hope
name does not offend you... :-)]

Pavel
PS: Podfuk is not multithreaded, and it should be. But it works
reliably for over 2 years (I think).

-- 
The best software in life is free (not shareware)!		Pavel
GCM d? s-: !g p?:+ au- a--@ w+ v- C++@ UL+++ L++ N++ E++ W--- M- Y- R+

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