Re: remember(-diary).el

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 >     Would it be possible for emacs to read its files from some kind of
 >     archive? That way the issue of different filesystems having
 >     substandard support for long filenames wouldnt come up.
 > 
 > I don't want to bother with new features to support semi-obsolete
 > systems.  Renaming files is less work.

While there's probably no hurry to implement the feature for Emacs,
the idea of reading files from archives rather than on-disk file
systems has many applications.

For example, Python and Java have the concept of "eggs" and "jar
files" respectively, which simplify the distribution of 3rd-party
libraries, both by removing the distinction between the distribution
medium and the installed package and by making the directory listing
of the installed packages cleaner.  These are basically just zip
archives.  Also, most free software OSes today provide file systems
which allow mounting archives as file systems, as well as more
primitive loopback file systems that emulate an on-disk file system's
layout in a file.

The advantage of implementing at the application level is that
directory access doesn't require a system call.