file attributes

[Tom Christiansen]

>From the keyboard of mjr at hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum):
:	I realize that Macs do thier attribute stuff in the kernel, but
:there is only one vendor that makes Macs, and it's easy to standardize
:in that case. Don't junk up the already bloated kernel - write your
:application right. Besides - I don't see how you can say UNIX doesn't
:have good facilities for doing this kind of stuff - have you ever looked
:at Visix' "Looking Glass" or something like that? It works fine, and
:since they are producing a commercial product, they didn't have time to
:wait for everyone to see the light and ram some useless new system
:call into their kernel.

You'll find that a non-zero portion of the users running under UNIX
today are what we'd call technically unsophisticated users, ones whose
principal prior experience with interactive computers is with a Mac.
Some of these wish that there were a Mac-like interface for UNIX.  I've
looked at the Looking Glass product and was not particularly
impressed.  I don't really think this is what they want: to me, it
wasn't configurable enough and way too clumsy.

Now maybe it really is cumbersome, but maybe I'm just the wrong person
to evaluate this stuff.  Has anyone had any experience with a system of
this nature that non-UNIX gurus like to use?  Or do you just buy them
Macs and be done with it?

--tom
--
Tom Christiansen		tchrist at convex.com	convex!tchrist
		"So much mail, so little time."