Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote:

Hi,

> To me, the biggest advantage of the architecture you seem to have
> in mind is that it becomes extra easy to access and manipulate
> those objects (e.g. bookmarks, visited pages, etc.) from outside
> of the Mozilla.

Yep. That's one side of the story: using some universal storage
and integrating with lots of other applications or sharing between
several instances over the net will be quite trivial.

The oder side is simplicity: Mozilla really suffers from quite
unmaintainable code. Nobody really sees through, and the whole
blob is nearly undebuggable. People invent really sick "solutions"
to non-problems (ie. the mork "database"-format) and avoid really
necessary radical cleanups / refactoring.

My first plan (back several years) was to move out one thing by
another into separate (mozilla independent!) libs. This of course
would work, but compared with the simplicity of an virtual fs
it's just a waste of resources. With an clean and simple model,
the fs can handle 90% of the tasks by itself, and from that point
we can do all these nice things which can be done with an fs
(ie. sharing over the net).

Mozilla folks are working on other solutions which were meant to
go in a similar direction (ie. generalized db api, mork, sqlite)
for quite a long time (AFIAK in FF 3.x, sqlite should be standard),
but they all are additional features, the old crap will still be
carried for a long time. I really wonder, how they can seriously
think about embedded targets in such an sitation ;-O


cu
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