Re: A niche for the Hurd - next step: reality check

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 06:27:55PM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> And wouldn't this option of accessing a file in two ways be an ideal 
> candidate 
> for namespace based translator selection? 
> 
> An example: 
> 
> $ ls blah,,dir/
> $ nano blah,,xml

Certainly :-)

I wonder though whether it wouldn't be useful also to simply allow
opening a directory node as a file... This won't always work -- in some
situations the explicit naming is really necessary, or at least clearer;
but it seems to me that the directory/file duality could work well
enough in many cases.

The main problem I see here is deciding on the standard format for
flattened directories -- some will want XML, some will want s-expr...
Perhaps it's better to always explicitely specify it after all.

> Btw. the main idea about containers was to reduce the metadata for
> each single file,

Yes, I understand that -- and the metadata redundancy is one of the
reasons why I said that using fine-grained directory structures without
some container mechanism would be too inefficient... Guess I wasn't
clear enough.

-antrik-