Improving GNU PM translator

[Luca Ferroni]

Hi all,
a translator is a layer on the directory/file.
AFAIK The Hurd uses translators to give
file systems, networking,... supports.

ams said:

> Say you have the file, /foo/bar to which you attach the Hello World
> translator (a file translator that when read, will always show "Hello
> World!") to /foo.  If you read /foo (it is a file now!) you would get
> "Hello World!".  Remove the translator, and you have your old
> directory back, with the file bar in it.

Translators are applied also to directories.
In fact, you want to apply a translator to /bin /sbin and so on
(no matter if it is just one or more translators, I don't want to
go deep in those details now).

Now, let me do few statements to check my knowledge about
GNU System Creator too.

GSC is a program that, given a source tarball, adapts it to GNU.
This means mainly setting some configuring and making options 
... or ... what else ?

Please correct me if I am wrong.

If I am right, and I hope so :), I propose my ideas. 

In GNU PM plans, I read you talked about implementing package manager 
like BSD ports or, I suggest, Gentoo's Portage. 
I think GSC should manage something like Portage's ebuild scripts. 
These latter specify source tarball url and some compilation directives for a 
pkg. 
GoboLinux too uses Recipe that are similar to ebuilds but even simpler. 
I should say I've never tried BSD Ports, I think they work quite the same way.
Gentoo supports also slots to have multiple versions of a package.
(I don't know if this can help)

Now I talk about  /packages translator.
I suppose that if you apply a translator to a directory, you can specify how to 
write into and read from it.
We can make the translator performing the whole installation process 
as a dangling link or a directory is created into /packages.
Thus, translator (which is a kind of daemon ... isn't it?) asks GSC for
package's installation instructions, downloads the package, performs
some operations if needed (configures it to fit to GNU), 
unpacks it in target directory and creates the symlink to install it 
in the Hurdish way.

I don't know if you want include downloading and configuring in the GSC itself,
but it actually is not a problem.
Benefits are:
- installation with one operation and moreover, transparent file manager 
support.

In addition, it would be nice that as /packages is read, it directly shows 
target directories instead of symlinks. Thus either with file manager or CLI, 
it would be easier to surf packages' directories.

Bye
Luca

-- 
Luca Ferroni
www.cs.unibo.it/~fferroni/