From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 13:41:04 +0200 From: Enrico Weigelt To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Taking plan9 concepts to *nix Message-ID: <20070629114104.GA11889@nibiru.local> References: <20070628132929.GA11624@nibiru.local> <5d375e920706280959y3ab0ab5dveb82a158af21894d@mail.gmail.com> <20070628183237.GA9717@nibiru.local> <1183079576.19286.10.camel@linux.site> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1183079576.19286.10.camel@linux.site> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8b687566-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 * Roman Shaposhnik 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 -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: http://patches.metux.de/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------