On 25-Jul-06, at 8:08 PM, David Masover wrote:
Timothy Webster wrote:
...
Yes it would be really wonderful, if we could just see
directories as file and files as directories. Which of
course means a file and a directory are one in the
same.
Ever use OS X? It does this, to some extent, in Finder, which
supports
the lkml point that doing this in the filesystem, or anywhere in the
kernel, is unnecessary and a bad idea.
As things stand now the way forward seams to be per
application program mime types. Simple right, but it
is not because, applications tools like svn, brz,
There are two OS X file types that I know of, and probably quite a few
more, which are actually stored on disk as folders,
Apple calls them "packages": http://developer.apple.com/documentation/
DeveloperTools/Conceptual/SoftwareDistribution/Managed_Installs/
chapter_5_section_2.html
(I actually thought they were called "bundles", but as the following
page explains, "The term bundle indicates a directory with a specific
hierarchical structure, whereas the term package indicates a
directory that is treated as an opaque entity by the Finder.")
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/
CFBundles/Concepts/about.html
which is why most
Mac software is distributed as disk images or zipfiles. One is the
Application type (.app, though Finder hides the extension) and the
other
is the MPKG type (whatever it stands for, extension is .mpkg).
Apart from .pkg and .mpkg, bundle extensions are also treated
specially including .bundle, .component, .qtx, etc.
Basically, they appear as ordinary files to Finder, which means that
most of the time, you cannot see that there are files inside them.
You
double click on a .app, and it runs a script in a predefined relative
location inside the folder. Double click on a .mpkg, and it launches
their installer program. ...
By the way, Hans, Apple has beaten you by quite a bit for at least
some
of the functionality we've discussed. You can do operations on Search
Folders easily, which work by using Spotlight (an indexed fulltext
local
system search engine).
Apparently running SQLite underneath.
You can have files-as-directories, to a point.
There are generic ways of getting at metadata, and they are done as
plugins -- Spotlight plugins, anyway.
I'd much rather use the Reiser4 described in the whitepaper, of
course,
and I am getting sick of the lack of decent package management for my
Mac, so I'll be adding a Linux boot. I'm curious to see if Reiser4 is
stable on PowerPC -- this is a year-old G4, I missed the Intel
cores by
just a few short months...
