Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: It's just storage

Author:Bruce Hoult
Posted:5/16/1999; 9:08:08 PM
Topic:Source release of Prefs.UserLand.Com
Msg #:6336 (In response to 6335)
Prev/Next:6335 / 6337

Let me amplify on that a little...

If you wanted to, a Linux version of Frontier could expose the contents of a Frontier database as if it was part of the filesystem. You've already got a hierachical organisation, you've already got creation and modification dates for items. You've already got a lot of stuff.

You could expose it all to tools such as cat and grep and emacs. Certainly read-only. Maybe read/write if you wanted.

You can kinda do this on MacOS, but not really. It's always been easy to make RAMDisk or mount a disk image or something, but that's just reading and writing blocks the the MacOS code does all the work of maintaining the directory structures and allocating space etc. It's crude. Writing a new filesystem for the Mac has always been essentially impossible. Writing an AFP server is easier, but that means using networking to access it. And, either way, the user ends up with extra disk icons on their desktop.

With Linux the API is pretty easy, and the user need never know that it's not "real" files (whatever those are) there.

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