Re: /home/user/var ?
On Sun, May 21, 2000 at 08:33:59AM +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > In many cases, this is because we have the opportunity to use anything
> > else; most of the other environments---such as ITS, Multics, TOPS-10,
> > TENEX, VM, VMS, Genera, NeXTStep, Plan 9 etc.---will only run on
> > expensive, obsolete or difficult-to-emulate hardware, and the software
> > is rarely available.
> What about MacOS ?
> This is very rare example of Completely Broken Operating System.
> You can learn what to not do with any free OS.
Although I'm not a Mac fan (the only Mac I've got is a IIci running Linux!),
I don't think it's completely broken (IMHO); the interface is fairly
pleasant if you like GUIs and generally consistent, and it's easy to kick
the OS out of the way if you want to do something on the bare hardware (like
blasting MIDI data out to a port with precise timings).
> Visit some school w/o newer computers, to see examples w/o spending any cash.
Even better, I work for an engineering software company which gets various
interesting machines on loan for development purposes from hardware companies.
:)
> > For instance: one of the easily-available bits of documentation about
> > ITS is a paper about what ITS called "PCLSRing", which pretty much blew
> > me away when I first read it.
> Are you talking about EBUSY or what ? Example please.
EINTR; have a look at my previous reply for an example with read().
> > [...] there are a few interesting [feature]s that, while available in
> > the early 80s, aren't common today: such as file version numbers.
> This wasn't implemented probably because everyone has the only proper
> idea of what is correct scheme of versioning and others' versions'
> names make him sick. This is like indentation.
Then perhaps the implementation could make it configurable on a
per-directory basis, or support several schemes? Once version numbers were
implemented in a filesystem, it would be easy enough to write simple
rcs/cvs/cleartool-style wrappers that used it.
> One more feature worth considering : very fast bootstarting and shutdowning
> Sesion savefiles come to help it.
Yep, that's a nice feature. From a software point of view, it's not
impossible; you just have to dump and restore the contents of memory and the
state of the CPUs to disk. The difficult part comes when reinitialising the
hardware to the same state it was before; one solution (often seen on
laptops/palmtops) is to keep most of the hardware in a micropowered "sleep"
mode so it can maintain its own state.
I remember seeing an AmigaOS hack to do suspend/restore from disk; however,
it only worked for limited hardware (i.e. what most Amigas had anyway).
> > ObOnTopic: I think ~/var is _really_ ugly. If you want to be Unixy, it
> > should be ~/etc.
> My idea was to ~/etc be for config files instead of dotfiles and ~/var to
> be for mailbox, caches, sesion state savefiles, and other data that
> changes w/o user intervention.
OK, that's sensible. But I'd still rather have ~/.etc and ~/.var. :)
--
Adam Sampson
azz@gnu.org
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