> I think the only serious weakness of the plain old directory is the
> one NextStep has - lack of discipline. Anyone can put irrelevant files
> in the document directory, and make a mess.
Various people with a real-life experience of working with NeXT
explained in this discussion that this is not a practical problem in the
real life, that it actually is beneficial and provided numerous and
varied reasons why this is the case. "Theoriticians" are coming
back with objections. I wonder why this is that? :-)
BTW - the said NeXT is also using an RTF extension - "rtfd" documents.
This trailing "d" means that the document is really a directory
and shows up as a single document only to tools (editors, viewers,
file system listers) which are aware of a special meaning of this
extension. Sounds familar?
Preventing users from doing smart things because somebody may do
a stupid thing was never "a Unix/Linux way". I would propose not
to change that attitude or we will fall in the same traps others
around so vividly illustrate. Tools which can transparently
flatten and expand such complex structures for purposes of archival,
transfer, whatever,.... are a good thing; but this is mostly a user
space issue even if some kernel hooks may turn out to be beneficial
to make life easier.
Michal
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