| From: | Aaron Ruscetta |
| Date: | 8 Sep 2000 at 18:29:28 |
| Subject: | Re: AMIOPEN: A few questions... |
On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Ed Dana wrote:
> Jesse McClusky wrote:
> > Gary, Rudi, and Fleecy (I believe) all have stated at one time
> > or another that "Tao is working on the problem." Basically,
> > they've gotta change some internal kernal stuff to make it
> > happen.
> They need something akin to the Classic Amiga "assign" command.
> Leaving this out would be tragic, IMHO.
Amiga's ASSIGN is a great mechanism, no doubt about it. I miss it a
lot on every other system I have to use.
Though in following some File System threads on the PHX list and
giving a lot of thought to the problems, two other paths <PI> appear
as possibilities, especially since the stated etherial AMI goal is to
do away with the "file" concept all together.
One, as suggested by some on PHX, is to make every file a true OBJECT,
where all locality, datatyping, conversion, etc. is handled by a
services registry and the object itself.
My own musings on the discussion led me to another idea (probably an
old one, maybe an overly simple one, and definitely hypothetical, but
here it is anyway):
A lot of the shortcomings in the file system and network access
paradigms I've seen come from the simple fact that the data's
Physical Locality is basically locked into being the Top level.
( eg. Amiga's ASSIGN command is such a powerful tool because it lets
you re-define and extend any Physical Directory or Device on the
system as the Top Level of a file's location reference).
So what if we had a file system where the Physical Access layer (and
related considerations like available storage space) were moved to the
position of being a File Attribute??
In brief, all available data Packages (via net links, stored files,
etc.) would be in a database or registry maintained by the File
System. In this DB/list, "DEVICE" is an attribute of every Package.
This attribute defines the Top Level location reference for any
Package access by the system.
With such a File system, when one did something like...
"LIST pix/ FILES"
...instead of seeing just the data available in one physical
location, you would see the files in every location where "pix/" was a
directory of a Package's top level. (!) A user could easily list all
the pictures
Limiting the search would be as simple as using the DEVICE attribute
in the same way you can use path and pattern matching with present
file systems. If one only wanted to see the files in the 'pix/'
directory of the HD0: device, perhaps the command line request would
look somethin like:
"LIST pix/:HD0 FILES"
...anyway, I think that communicates the idea and hopefully gave a
little fuel for thought.
Of course, most of this would be equally realized with proper
implementation of an OBJECT based file system. I just thought the idea
worth sharing and thinking about here. Also, since almost none of the
implementation details for AmiVerse are available, it may be that some
elements are still in flux and worth discussing.
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