On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Billy Harvey wrote:
> 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.
Good idea so far...
> 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.
Erm... nope.
> 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.
What we should have is a deamon which syncs changes to the disk image back
to the floppy. If the disk is removed, this daemon will get an I/O error,
which it can respond to appropriately (e.g. "Please put the disk back in
the drive") while other programs continue operating properly.
> The image file can then be either automatically umounted and deleted,
OK, simple logic:
* User removes current floppy and inserts new one
* Is the image synced with the last floppy yet?
* Yes: Unmount old image, replace with image of current disk
* No: Object loudly :)
> 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,
Yep; good idea from that point.
> and the forced physical removal of the floppy will also
> force a recognition of a need to later synchronize.
Bad idea. Forced removal of floppy = pissed off users :-)
James.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:27 EST