On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 07:23:05AM -0500, Reed Hedges wrote: > > How is this different than the way things currently are?
It's not, except that s5 uses 32 bit identifiers as the "canonical name" of a vobject rather than arbitrary strings. > Are you proposing to require that all objects except one special root > have at least one parent? Or just to encourage that practice for most > objects? Requiring it. This allows us to have one unified namespace instead of lots of little subtrees hanging off the site root. Also I think this makes it easier to ultimately start defining recommendations for organization (i.e. where does vobject reflection go, configuration, worlds, hypervos pages, etc... it may well end up looking like a unix filesystem!) Also, by forcing everything to start from one particular root, we can garbage collect the site by occasionally running a mark-and-sweep algorithm to sweep up cruft in the form of discarded vobjects. If you'll recall, long-lived sites (interreality.org hypervos site, and the 3D worlds using the irc bridge) have a way of steadily gaining vobjects that weren't connected to anything and never deleted. Obviously this is partially a programming problem that they weren't freed properly, but it would be a great advantage to be able to automatically sweep up these loose vobjects. > Reed > > Peter Amstutz wrote: > > I just wanted to float another idea for a change in s4 to s5. > > Previously in s4, there was no well defined "root" of the vobject tree. > > Or rather, there was the site root, but listing the contents of this > > root would get you every vobject on the site, which was rarely what you > > wanted. > > > > I'm thinking that it would be useful to have a well defined root, > > similar to the unix file system root, and for vobjects on the site to be > > treated sort of like inodes. This has a few advantages: it is simpler > > to "mount" conventional filesystems onto the VOS namespace, and it is > > easy to identify "named" (accessable via the root) and "unnamed" > > objects, and to garbage collect the latter since we found that > > long-running sites had a tendency to build up cruft in the form of > > discarded unlinked vobjects. > > > > A vobject would now be describable as either a literal identifier like > > vos://interreality.org/$88FA3483 or with a path like > > vos://interreality.org/worlds/blocks. The former would be used > > internally, the latter would reflect the human and programmatic layout > > of a VOS site. > > > > VOS reflective structures would be linked as branches off the root, such > > as the list of vobject types, and sitewide configuration parameters > > (like what plugins are loaded). So you could browse > > vos://interreality.org/types/namespaces/core to get a list of all > > vobject types present in the "core" namespace. Or you could browse > > vos://interreality.org/etc/plugins to get a list of plugins. This would > > be well defined so that these structures are available on any site. > > > > Child links would be like hard links in a Unix file system, except that > > we'll maintain the "parent" list, so you can actually tell who's > > pointing to a particular vobject. I suppose in this scheme a hypercard > > would be like a symbolic link. > > > > The basic model of the child list as associative list would be > > unaffected. Also, this is extremely easy to implement, since the code > > for parsing and following paths is more or less the same either way. > > > > [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] > > [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] > > [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] > > [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ] > > > > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > _______________________________________________ > > vos-d mailing list > > vos-d@interreality.org > > http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d > > > _______________________________________________ > vos-d mailing list > vos-d@interreality.org > http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d -- [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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