Re: Longhorn Killer

[Nicolas Roard]

Le 22 mars 04, à 18:40, Helge Hess a écrit :
> Indeed OGo includes something like that (project document database), 
> it uses a combination of NSFileManager and EODataSource as the 
> Objective-C API, so this would be possible for GNUstep. But of course 
> using a database has quite some overhead in case you want to do just 
> regular filesystem stuff.
> Eg the gain of being able to sort the whole harddisk on filetype "gif" 
> in milliseconds certainly isn't worth the loss of performance due to 
> the increased management overhead on any regular operation.

Yes... I think it could be interesting to use in GNUstep some DB-like 
functionalities from filesystem like ReiserFS. It doesn't mean to redo 
everythin in fact; for the desktop applications, a change on 
NSFileManager and on the open/save panel would be enough I guess. But, 
well, that's imho not really an important point right now. What we miss 
for the moment are still applications and momentum, possibly LinuxSTEP 
or equivalent initiatives; we don't need to focus on DB-like system 
yet.
With future filesystems which will provides us an easy way of looking 
at thing in a db-way, with metadatas, we'll be able to do nice and 
interesting things. But that's the future, and it's not really linked 
to GNUstep anyway, more to linux in general.

> In contrary, when Longhorn is due, it will again be an *excellent* 
> time to migrate users to other systems, because people will be told to 
> buy upgrades. This worked very well to the advantage of Linux in the 
> past.

Excellent point :-)

> > Its all about going beyond unix.
>
> IMHO one of the strong points of NeXTstep was that it is not going 
> beyond Unix but integrating it. And the same is true (to a lesser 
> extend, Finder argh) for MacOSX.

I agree ... what was good in NeXTSTEP, is that the Unix part was not 
just "hidden", but more integrated. The workspace with its NSBrowser is 
a good example; with current OS (unix..) you have quite often deep 
paths/directories; NSBrowser is really good for browsing that. Compare 
to the window's explorer, which is still, conceptually, tied to the DOS 
world where you had not as much files/directories as you have now..

--
Nicolas Roard