What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?
Brandon S. Allbery
allbery at ncoast.ORG
Wed Jun 14 09:16:58 AEST 1989
As quoted from <190 at dg.dg.com> by rec at dg.dg.com (Robert Cousins):
+---------------
| In article <4438 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
| >This is an intriguing idea. I, myself, would prefer to make '@' by itself
| >at the beginning of a file name a special token. This solves the problem
| >of files beginning with @ in /tmp...
+---------------
Gag me with a Worknet. Altos's network scheme uses @ as a magic character
(a super-root, corresponding roughly to // in Apollo networking). I've
found it to be something of a pain.
I would suggest something like a file system switch-accessible method:
mount a "filesystem" which accesses file descriptors, or "default" devices,
or etc.
+---------------
| AOS/VS from Data General has the concept of default files. These files
| being with the character @ and are "special." Whenever a program attempts
| to open @output, the OS converts this file name to an already established
| file name (the terminal by default). However, the value of @output can
| be changed at the CLI (shell) level. This serves a function similar to
| a cross between environment variables and I/O redirection. It is, however,
| VERY useful for many tasks.
+---------------
//GO.SYSIN DD *
Yuck. One small step backwards for IBM, one giant leap backwards for
operating systems.
+---------------
| Perhaps a better solution would be to use some special character to
| signal a non-filesystem request to be passed to a another task. THis
| would allow special filesystems to be implemented as dedicated tasks
| and then used transparently. The task would simply initialize and then
+---------------
I still like the FSS. It would, of course, be nice if the FSS entries
could be implemented as separate processes, and have the FSS be dynamically
modifiable; then you could "advertize" (i.e. put into the FSS) a new
"filesystem" type, whether it be a real filesystem, /proc, or whatever, and
access it as part of the directory tree.
Isn't Mach supposed to be able to do this to some extent?
++Brandon
--
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc allbery at ncoast.org
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