From: kem@prl.ufl.edu (Kelly Murray) Subject: Re: automatic old-file compression Date: 28 May 1993 18:12:17 GMT
In article <SCT.93May27192407@malts.dcs.ed.ac.uk>, sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) writes:
|>
|>
|> > ST> I am already working on providing transparent compressed-file
|> > ST> support for ext2fs under Linux. It would be trivial to add a
|> > ST> daemon which compressed seldomly-used files.
|>
|> > Looking forward happily to when this is completed. Question: Would
|> > it be an excessive amount of work to provide an option whereby
|> > compressed tar files could be accessed as if they were directories?
|>
|> Yes! This kind of thing just does not belong in the kernel. However,
|> there was recently an announcement of a process filesystem which would
|> transparently interface between the kernel's internal filesystem
|> interface and an external user-mode process. Using this, you could
|> write a fancy filesystem application which could provide facilities
|> such as tar-file unravelling. The disadvantage is performance; you
|> lose the advantages of having a multi-threaded filesystem if you go
|> through an external application.
|>
Let me take this opportunity to point out that Unix is too low-level
for such interesting ideas. A true Object-Oriented Operating System
(hmm, a OOOS?) would provide a function files = directory(pathname);
that returns a list of the filenames for the pathname, and one could
add specializations of the directory method to handle different
types of pathnames, such as a .tar, or a .tar.z, or whatever.
Should I shut-up already, and stop dreaming?
|> As an alternative, why not use emacs?? Seriously!
|>
|> I use a combination of the crypt++ and tar-mode packages under emacs,
|> and whenever I visit a .tar.z file, it automatically uncompresses and
|> parses the tar file, giving me a dired-style directory listing of the
|> tar file contents. I can even visit and save individual component
|> files, and the compressed tar archive will be automatically updated
|> when I save or quit. Rather nice!
|>
|> (Beware for rather large memory requirements if you load
|> linux-0.99.9.tar.z into emacs, though: they don't call it Eight
|> Megabytes And Constantly Swapping for nothing...)
|> Cheers,
|> Stephen Tweedie.
Emacs is getting pretty darn close to being an operating system itself.
It doesn't seem to far-fetched to bring up emacs (especially the new version
with multiple windows, scroll-bars, etc.) and use just about nothing else,
writing whole applications using the emacs lisp language.
-Kelly