Re: DogCows or Polymorphism in the Hurd

[Patrick Negre]

Hello,
I apologize for my bad english.

I have read docs and codes of hurd and coyotos, i'm not an expert as you are, 
so here is my simple user point of view.

Marcus wrote :
> _Everything_ is going to
> be a translator :) "Files" are objects provided by the "file"
> translator.

Ok, but i want my ls command to list files, i will be very confuse if one of 
my file is listed as many time as the number of translators set on it.
I expect my command "rm f" to remove a file not a view.

I want my system to be sufficently smart to understand that "cd foo.tar.gz" 
mean i wanna browse foo.tar.gz, and after execution i expect   to be in 
"foo.tar.gz/" as i asked. ( under the condition foo.tar.gz is browsable .

I expect, when i command a "cat whatever", that the system will understand 
that i wanna access "whatever" as a file.

I want to have a simple way to access a file with a non default view, like 
( it's an example ) : "cat whatever::binary"

Tom Bachmann wrote:
> the problem is that POSIX only specifies one reserved character, '/', 
> and thus foo.tar.bz2:as_dir is a valid name. So such a file could exist.
Does POSIX specify anything about polytype files ?


All this can't be possible if the system don't handle unspecified access, as 
the POSIX open(), or stat().

To handle this access, unspecified access can be mapped to a default 
translator. Obviously, it must be a per-filetype setting (default access 
don't have to be the same for a directory or for a file ). 
Perhaps, default access can be more precisely managed if the filesystem have 
the extended attributes for his files, so default access can be specified for 
a single file.
So, all  unspecified access to a file will be forwarded to this default 
translator.

In the same way, it should be possible to specify default_file, and 
default_dir mappings, so  programs aware of polytype will access the 
appropriate translator set by the user.
So, as exemple find can be tuned to explore files that have a default_dir 
access, or tuned to explore only the files which default access is dir 
capable.

Absolute and comprehensive path like "./foo.tar.gz::gzip/f.xml::xml/value" are 
possible and share by every applications, aware or not of polytype 
possibilities.

This is my simple user proposition.

Regards,
Patrick N.

        

        
                
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