[geeks] Custom NFS servers

[geeks at sunhelp.org]

jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:

>On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 06:49:22PM -0500, dave at cca.org wrote:
>> >I thought it would be cool to look into an FTP and http file system. Imagine
>> >/http/www.sunhelp.org/index.html or
>> >/ftp/ftp.gnome.org/anonymous/jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu/pub/gnome/stable/
>> >Anyway, it was just a thought.
>> 
>> Ah, but wouldn't it be much much cleaner to just have URLs as your
>> basic filepath type?

>Do you mean use file://~/.emacs, nfs://servitude/export/joshua and so on?  Why
>would I want to do that?

Why do browsers use URLs? It works nicely.

You could "cd file://" and everything would be traditional unix untill
you refered to a different "something:". And if you "cd http:/...." everything
would continue to work properly. Following links breaks very quickly
in the /http/.... scenario.

>The appeal of http and ftp as file systems is then existing software could use 
>them flawlessly.  And it doesn't end there.  I keep thinking that a /gtk/procid
>file system would be cool (instant bindings for any new scripting language).

/http doesn't work flawlessly at all. Links from an html document are URLs
you know. If you have to massage every single link you want to follow
in user space, that seems kind of flawed, doesn't it? You can't search
the web using "find" if open() doesn't understand URLs.

Accessing http via something close-to-but-not-quite URLs seems like a
really short-sighted hack to me.

-------- David Fischer --------- dave at cca.org --------- www.cca.org --------
---------------------- "It's something to do." -Cerebus --------------------