I just wanted to float another idea for a change in s4 to s5. Previously in s4, there was no well defined "root" of the vobject tree. Or rather, there was the site root, but listing the contents of this root would get you every vobject on the site, which was rarely what you wanted.
I'm thinking that it would be useful to have a well defined root, similar to the unix file system root, and for vobjects on the site to be treated sort of like inodes. This has a few advantages: it is simpler to "mount" conventional filesystems onto the VOS namespace, and it is easy to identify "named" (accessable via the root) and "unnamed" objects, and to garbage collect the latter since we found that long-running sites had a tendency to build up cruft in the form of discarded unlinked vobjects. A vobject would now be describable as either a literal identifier like vos://interreality.org/$88FA3483 or with a path like vos://interreality.org/worlds/blocks. The former would be used internally, the latter would reflect the human and programmatic layout of a VOS site. VOS reflective structures would be linked as branches off the root, such as the list of vobject types, and sitewide configuration parameters (like what plugins are loaded). So you could browse vos://interreality.org/types/namespaces/core to get a list of all vobject types present in the "core" namespace. Or you could browse vos://interreality.org/etc/plugins to get a list of plugins. This would be well defined so that these structures are available on any site. Child links would be like hard links in a Unix file system, except that we'll maintain the "parent" list, so you can actually tell who's pointing to a particular vobject. I suppose in this scheme a hypercard would be like a symbolic link. The basic model of the child list as associative list would be unaffected. Also, this is extremely easy to implement, since the code for parsing and following paths is more or less the same either way. [ Peter Amstutz ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ][ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet] [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ] [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey: pgpkeys.mit.edu 18C21DF7 ]
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