Re: RE : GSMBrowser.

[Chris B. Vetter]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 07:35:31 -0500
Tim Harrison <tim@linuxstep.org> wrote: 
[...]
> Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean (being as I'm just about to 
> leave work after a 12h shift :)), but I think that if one is going to 
> mount a remote filesystem locally, it should be viewed as part of the 
> local filesystem, and the local filesystem should be viewed without 
> modification.  I get nervous when there's talk of representing paths 
> differently between the filesystem and the GUI presentation.  Smacks
> of Windows. ;)

In my experience with users, they don't have a clue (and really don't
case enough) whether a drive, directory or file is located locally on
their box or on a remote machine.

As an example, here at the office, we 'mount' each user's home directory
on a fileserver to H:\ on a user's local machine.
To them, drive H:\ _is_ local.

Now, we all know that potential users of GNUstep are (at least slightly)
familiar with the concept or a 'local' and 'remote' machine/server but
you cannot _assume_ that it is the case.

So you (and Peter ;-) are probably right to think about something like a
"virtual mount point". A John Doe users wants (and should have it) as
convenient as possible, as long as it"just works". He doesn't want to
type foo://bar/myfile nor does he want to remember whether his file is
on a machine named Foo or machine Bar.

-- 
Chris