| From: | Alexander G. M. Smith |
| Date: | 13 Sep 2000 at 02:27:34 |
| Subject: | Re: AMIOPEN: ACR #1: Intelligent FileSystem |
Aaron Optimizer Digulla <digulla@hepe.com> wrote on
Tue, 12 Sep 2000 15:18:45 +0200 (CEST):
> The Ami FileSystem (FS) should drop support for what we
> knew as "file". Instead, the most simple element in the
> FS should be a "directory". [...]
> Depending on the type of the "file", it should "contain"
> some default files. Examples a file demo.txt would contain
> a text file demo.txt/type which contains "ASCII Text" or
> similar. demo.gif would contain demo.gif/type "GIF Image",
> .../width, .../height and maybe .../thumbnail. If .../thumbnail
> exists, then it will be a picture (any supported type).
> thumbnail will probably also contain elements (but no thumbnail :-)
Sounds good, a lot like how BeOS and OS/2 do named attributes,
except that you can have attributes inside attributes. By the
way, the BeOS attributes can be as large as a regular file.
Taking a leaf out of BeOS's page, the file types could be MIME
type strings rather than just "GIF Image" it would be "image/gif".
>Also links to application software would be great. Like this:
> demo.gif/ [...]
> show/
> xv@
> ImageMagick@
Yes, attributes in attributes could be used for listing multiple
things, like the programs you can open a "file" with. Though
BeOS uses the MIME type to generate that list, and only stores
the prefered program if the user wants to override the default.
This then leads to a long argument about whether there should
be different prefered programs for printing, editing, showing
etc :-).
> It should be possible to create archives of such hierarchies
> by specifying an existing file/directory and appending the
> archive extension to the name (example: cp demo.gif.zip
> demo.zip).
Do we want to clutter up the file names with file extensions?
Admittedly it's the easiest way to feed a request to the file
system for the compressed version of the file. But end users
don't know a zip from a sit or an lha.
>- In a similar way, it should be possible to cd into archives and
>add/remove files in them just as if they were normal directories.
I was thinking of doing such a file system as an exercise in
learning about file systems. I suppose that if I ever get
it finished (and started), I could then play around with the
other file system experiments you have suggested here.
Or maybe everything should be an object. Just that some objects
contain references to other ones, call them directories :-).
- Alex
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