On 1/6/2004 5:58 PM, Mark Crispin wrote: > The barrier that your idea needs to overcome is "why not use a root-level > name instead of a namespace."
To be clear, I'm not making a proposal. My original question was whether or not this is a hole in the protocol. Obviously it's not a very big hole or else it would have been filled already. To answer your question though, there are a lot of operational benefits to dynamic partitions. An obvious benefit is that partitioning simplifies replication. Another benefit is that it allows you to use alternative storage mechanisms, like maybe putting a partition on a CD-RW drive, and only bothering to make it available when you need to access it (this is what I was thinking about with the #Archive thing). Some of the more mundaine benefits are already well known (that's why servers offer the off-line mechanisms that they do have, because they are valuable). The only real question is whether or not there would be more or less value in providing in-band mechanisms for this stuff. In the general case, I think that having folder-managemenet tools available (eg, ACL widgets) would be useful for partitions, although the frequency of such usages may be suspect. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
