Re: httpfs, tarfs --help

[Niels Möller]

Adam Olsen <rhamph@d2dc.net> writes:

> On Sun, Dec 23, 2001 at 09:48:06AM +1100, Michael Lucas-Smith wrote:

> > I personally think having translators start automatically for a MIME like 
> > system would be extremely impressive.

As I said the last time mimish things were discussed, I think the
right thing to do is to add property lists to inodes. Then you could
have a single interface for handling all attributes you'd like.

> And to make it even more impressive, make it take full advantage of
> the security mechanisms the hurd can provide, eg no user ids (is that
> the term I'm looking for?
>
> Personally, I'm paranoid just playing a mpeg or viewing a ps file, but
> what options do I really have?

That's a very different issue, I think. And easier. You should be able
to wrap up an mpeg player in a shell-script like

  #! /bin/sh

  (drop-uids decode-mpeg) <"$1" >/dev/audio

The idea is to open the input and output files, using your normal uid
and its associated permissions, and then start a subprocess for
decoding the data with no uids, that only needs to accesses stdin and
stdout.

/Niels