On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 09:47:03AM -0600, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I've been looking at implementing msdos filesystem support in the GNOME
> VFS (virtual filesystem) layer. This way users could be given read and
> write access to the device (eg: /dev/fd0) and the filesystem stuff
> would happen at the library level. This wouldn't be as fast (due to the
> lack of caching) and would only be available to GNOME programs, but I
> think its a solution to the problem.
>
> Despite my loyalty to GNOME (as a part of the GNU Project), on
> technical grounds I have to disagree. File access needs to be
> available to all the programs on the system, and the only natural way
> to do that is through the kernel and the C library. Doing this in
> GNOME will produce a feature that half-works, which means it will
> appear to the users as an unreliable feature.
I sort of agree with you on this, but you can extend this argument to just
about any feature of a non-core library. In GTK we implement widgets which
the X libraries don't. This leads to user interface inconsistencies. In
gnome-vfs we support remote filesystems which libc doesn't. This leads to
inconsistent filesystem handling between applications.
Ian
-- Ian McKellar | Email: yakk(a)yakk.net | Web: http://www.yakk.net/ Area: +61 (8) | Home: 9389 9152 | Fax/Voice: 9260 2903 | Work: 9384 4700- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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