Timothy Webster wrote: > WARNING, a users point of view ;) > Everything is a file, including a directory. > > Being able to view files as directories is not just a > nice to have thing. It is actually required if we are > going to manage changesets of odf files.
The lkml people will tell you that this isn't required at all, and it's ludicrous to say so. And they're somewhat right -- you could just patch SVN, and it might be easier than writing a Reiser4 plugin. > The truth is most people aren't code developers, but > document developers. odf files are a container. And it is XML inside. Come on, do you really expect people to read XML diffs? Even if you split the XML out into files/dirs based on elements, using SVN directly would be way too arcane to people who are used to what word processors already do -- it's something called "Track Changes". Fire up OpenOffice and check out the Edit->Changes menu. Word has a similar feature. Not as powerful, maybe, but most people are not collaborative document developers, either. > But just about just about every program or script > would be better off seening the odf as a compressed > directory. Maybe, maybe not. > Yes it would be really wonderful, if we could just see > directories as file and files as directories. Which of > course means a file and a directory are one in the > same. Ever use OS X? It does this, to some extent, in Finder, which supports the lkml point that doing this in the filesystem, or anywhere in the kernel, is unnecessary and a bad idea. > As things stand now the way forward seams to be per > application program mime types. Simple right, but it > is not because, applications tools like svn, brz, There are two OS X file types that I know of, and probably quite a few more, which are actually stored on disk as folders, which is why most Mac software is distributed as disk images or zipfiles. One is the Application type (.app, though Finder hides the extension) and the other is the MPKG type (whatever it stands for, extension is .mpkg). Basically, they appear as ordinary files to Finder, which means that most of the time, you cannot see that there are files inside them. You double click on a .app, and it runs a script in a predefined relative location inside the folder. Double click on a .mpkg, and it launches their installer program. Drag them around and they behave like files in every way, except that you cannot email them, upload them to a web page, or interact with anywhere other than your local Mac system which expects single files. But when you run into that, just zip them. But if you want, you can right-click on them (or control+click) and -- I forget which option it is, but you can browse inside the package. By the way, Hans, Apple has beaten you by quite a bit for at least some of the functionality we've discussed. You can do operations on Search Folders easily, which work by using Spotlight (an indexed fulltext local system search engine). You can have files-as-directories, to a point. There are generic ways of getting at metadata, and they are done as plugins -- Spotlight plugins, anyway. I'd much rather use the Reiser4 described in the whitepaper, of course, and I am getting sick of the lack of decent package management for my Mac, so I'll be adding a Linux boot. I'm curious to see if Reiser4 is stable on PowerPC -- this is a year-old G4, I missed the Intel cores by just a few short months...
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