[movitz-devel] Re: Topic of list

[Frode Vatvedt Fjeld]

james at unlambda.com (James A. Crippen) writes:

> If you think a POS is a good idea then don't hesitate to implement
> it. But it's not a good idea to have a general purpose operating
> system without a filesystem for it. People are very used to file
> handling and will be very confused when confronted with a system
> that doesn't do so.

But don't forget the confusion that actually results from the
omnipresent file-system model. Not just the confusion that computer
novices experience when first using a computer, but all the packaging,
versioning, (sym-)linking, etc. issues that to at least some degree
might be rooted in the way filesystems are.

> If you're looking towards a special purpose system or an embedded
> system that relies only on a POS then of course that makes
> sense. But for general purpose, especially desktop programming use,
> a POS isn't a sufficient replacement for a filesystem. The two
> organize data in completely different ways, and have very different
> purposes.

I don't think I agree with this. A desktop system tries to present the
analogy of a desktop, with drawers for the files one isn't working on
at the moment. The POS won't have any problems providing this. And I
don't think that e.g. the way Windows maps the desktop metaphor onto
filesystems is in any way clearly the Right solution.

> However, security shouldn't be hard to handle if you implement
> multiprocessing like on a Unixy system where every process has its
> own address space.

Remember that you can have protection also in a single address-space
system.

-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld