> Damien Miller writes:
> > On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> >
> >> Fortunately I don't mind trolls. I don't think I have _ever_ seen
> >> a compound document represented as a directory. I know that TeX
> >> users do it sometimes, but they aren't normal users anyway.
> >> Ask a random MBA, art student, or secretary what "TeX" is.
> >> Normal users don't write Makefiles for their documents.
> >
> > Your random MBA, art student or secretary will be using an
> > application or GUI which hides the fact that the albod is
> > a directory.
> >
> > What part of that can't you understand?
>
> I can't understand why you think normal people should not use Linux.
> More users means friendly hardware vendors. More users means I can
> read more of the email attachments I get. More users means I can buy
> a cheap off-the-shelf PC like everyone else and NOT pay the M$ tax.
I don't see how what I wrote above has any relation to this
accusatory rant.
> I think you know damn well that there will never be a GUI that covers
> the whole system well enough to _consistantly_ hide the use of
> directories to represent files. Such a GUI would have to cover
> everything everywhere. Who would maintain it?
Try reading what I wrote: "an application or GUI"
> If such a GUI were to be created, we are back to the old problem.
> You must use a dumbed-down proprietary GUI if you want to share
> documents with your co-workers. Yeah, it runs on Linux. Big deal.
> Wait a minute... why would anyone switch to Linux? We are back to
> the separation between power users and weak users. Anything that
> puts power users and weak users in different worlds will leave
> us with a crummy OS (M$ or otherwise) owning the market.
More ranting.
I cannot help the feeling that you are avoiding the question by
recourse to irrelevant, emotional armwaving:
Why can albods not be implemented as directories filled with
files with a standard library to access them?
This would work on *any* platform. It would be very lightweight.
Components of an albod could me manipulated with standard tools.
The level of trolling posts to lkml would drop. It would not
bloat the kernel. It would not screw up libc. Application users
would see a single object.
You way however is to introduce a kernel change which is, by
nature, linux-only. Hope that the app developers use it. Hope
the BSD developers copy it and then hope that the rest of the
software industry follows suit.
I don't think so.
Regards,
Damien Miller
-- | "Bombay is 250ms from New York in the new world order" - Alan Cox | Damien Miller - http://www.ilogic.com.au/~dmiller | Email: dmiller@ilogic.com.au (home) -or- damien@ibs.com.au (work)
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