Richard Stallman writes:
>> Thats all very nice, but what do you do for the "luser" that opens a file
>> on the floppy using a word processor... I see that a LOT at work (plus the
>> use of excel/photoshop/exporer/...
>
> When you visit a file with Emacs, Emacs opens the file, reads it all,
> and closes it. Once that is finished, the file is not open any more.
> When you save the file, Emacs opens it, writes the whole text, then
> closes it. So if you removed the floppy after visiting, the save will
> get an error, but nothing worse will happen. If you replaced it with
> a different floppy, the save will go on the new floppy.
Your post the other day about this got me to thinking, and the Emacs
analogy above is similar to my though line and can be extended to
floppies with (hopefully) little confusion to newbies.
What is needed is a program which when called will dd the image of the
floppy just inserted into a file, in some specified location, perhaps
/var/floppy-`date +%s`, for example. with ownership assigned to
whomever did the calling.
Once the dd is complete, the floppy must be removed, this file is then
mounted using loopback. Removal of the floppy will force the newbie
to realize that the data being operated on is not physically on the
floppy.
Once the work is complete, there is a similar reverse process, which
can check to ensure that either a blank floppy or the same floppy is
used, that will call for the floppy to be inserted, and then will
dd the file back to the floppy, and then call for it to be removed.
The image file can then be either automatically umounted and deleted,
or alternatively marked in some way so that if it is kept mounted and
further written to, it will be considered dirty, annotating a need for
a further sync to the floppy.
The value of this is the usual sync and buffer ability of Linux is not
degraded, and the forced physical removal of the floppy will also
force a recognition of a need to later synchronize.
Thoughts?
Billy
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:27 EST