Re: heads up

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Please, don't lecture me about the Hurd being perfect; it's not.

Trust me, I won't lecture you about that, but I might lecture your
about how unperfect it is.

   A friend at the AI lab once gave the following dream as an example
   of a well-functioning system:

It all sounds like a Lisp Machine...  And even though I enjoyed your
little story, it has zlich todo with filesystems and user
interactions.

   You walk up to the workstation and start a complex memory intensive
   ray-tracing program.  It runs out of memory and swap space on the
   workstation.  A dialog pops up informing you of the situation and
   giving several options: suspend the job until later, kill it, and
   so forth.  (Notice that Unix and the Hurd both simply kill the
   process or the system here, because the discovery that swap is gone
   happens so low down that all context has been lost.)

I don't know about Unix, but on GNU/Hurd you could suspend the
process, then have some gdb magic so you can restart the process in
question from a previous point (and it would be nice to be able to
patch the process in question with new code, to fix a bug or similar).

So the process crashes, you have some little login script that shows
you your processes that are suspended/crashed/whatever, fire up gdb
see that it was because of non memory, add swap in another terminal,
and restart the program from some point

This is far simpler then having "dialogs poping up", it also begs the
question "where do those dialog windows pop up"; X11? the console? The
Hurd's new-fandangled-windowing-system-that-doesn't-exist-yet?  All of
the above?
   
   The reason that filesystems do not have user context is because I
   was not sufficiently far-sighted at the time to realize the full
   flexibility of the translator concept I had created.

No, it is because they can't have "user context", but feel free to
disprove me with some code.

Cheers.