file attributes

[Chris Siebenmann]

erik at sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel) writes:
| On the Macintosh, it is possible to double click on the icon that
| represents a file to invoke the application associated with that file.
| It is difficult to build a GUI (graphical user interface) to do the
| same for Unix systems, since Unix does not offer a standard way of
| attaching an application name to a file.

 I don't think this is the right solution; quick, what application name
should be attached to a Makefile? What happens if I decide I prefer to
use sam instead of GNU Emacs to edit files suddenly? Operations that I
want to do on Unix files are heavily context-dependant; sometimes I
want to edit my Makefiles, sometimes I want to run make on them.  How
do application names get attached to files?

 Other people have already proposed good mechanisms for doing this in
particular programs or particular environments without kernel changes.
I think that's sufficient until we understand the problem better.
People interested in a novel look at how to build an integrated user
interface to the system should look at Rob Pike's paper on his "help"
program from the Summer 1991 Usenix ("A Minimalist Global User
Interface").

--
 > 2 does not equal something, but something may in fact be equal to 2.
 "2 does not equal 3.  Not even for very large values of 2."
		- Roy Smith in a comp.lang.c article
cks at hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu	           ...!{utgpu,utzoo,watmath}!utgpu!cks