| From: | Aaron Optimizer Digulla |
| Date: | 12 Sep 2000 at 11:25:44 |
| Subject: | Re: [RE: AMIOPEN: AmiPak] |
Quoting "Victor I. Haaz" <victor@pannonline.hu>:
> >A much better solution would be if you can "cd" into an archive.
>
> I think I meant almost the same on "virtual directories", (what you just
> cut out). (AIK, it's already in Elate, just only with zip, and
> read-only.)
> Though, your additions seems to be good ideas. So that, if I got it
> right,
> that one can handle the original file by referring "whatever.zip", and
> as a directory by "whatever.zip/", and the files inside by
> "whatever.zip/...".
> (But how it works in Elate now?)
Actually, compress-on-the-fly would also be great (ie. if you have a
directory "foo", you can compress it by opening foo.zip, ie:
cp foo.zip a:
(compresses foo into a:foo.zip).
> >Maybe the best solution would be to drop the -r option for cp.
> What do you mean?
The problem is that directories don't behave like files when you
copy then but they behave like files when you rename/move them !
When you copy/delete them, then you must give the option "-r".
When you rename/move them, you must not give -r. This is confusing.
So the "clean" solution would be to handle directories just like
files (ie. it would be possible to cd into files, too). All operations
which can be done on files can also be done on directories (maybe we
should drop the idea of "directory" altogether; we only have files and
files can have "children").
The good thing about this is that you could add additional information
in "files" (for example, you could have a file x and use echo "This is
file X" >> x/comment to add a comment to it). Or you could have
a file with a picture demo.pic and when you cd into it, you would
see width, height, thumbnail, comment, etc.
There must be some kind of API which creates all necessary names which
a file "object" must have "inside" plus which makes sure that the types
of the data in these names are correct (width must contain an integer
and thumbnail a picture while comment can contain anything, for example,
a DTP document or another picture).
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