On 2007-03-02, Sam Mason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Things like tab completion and > working directory only really work when you have something with similar > semantics to a hierarchical file system and can afford to expose the > interface.
The concept of a directory does not really apply, but SetFS can (obviously) have a "working set", tab-completion, and so on. > Capability systems generally don't imply private namespaces, it's just > the only obvious way to implement this sort of thing under Linux. No, capability systems as you put it, only imply hanging onto what you see. But you need to give things some identifiers for the user to be able to talk about them to the system. You need namespaces. A capability system without names is useless. Dragging&dropping random icons presenting the objects between programs to give them access to things is totally impractical, totally unusable. You need names that you can just input, without laborously looking up the object -- as is the WIMP approach. Whether every program has direct access to global namespaces, or whether they need to query some other program that only sees the namespace (going to be a _lot_ of work to support various kinds of UIs!), for both the object and the name to talk about, is irrelevant to that. -- Tuomo
