Re: [9fans] correcting old failures, and NJ vs MA

["Thomas Bushnell, BSG" <tb+usenet@becket.net>]

viro@math.psu.edu (Alexander Viro) writes:

> I don't recall anybody complaining about the stuff find _misses_. It's
> stuff that it finds in places where it shouldn't have looked that is
> a problem.

Sure enough.  Perhaps it's clear that lots of problems are going to
happen when the semantics of a system are designed from the assumption
that it has a stable directory hierarchy, and then badda bing badda
boom, suddenly it doesn't: lots of userland stuff will break. 

 From the standpoint of designing a new system, that's not so much a
serious worry, because a new system, with no relation to Unix (unlike
Plan 9, say, or GNU) isn't going to have a big slew of utilities and
programmer assumptions that the hierarchy is static.

I'm not really so much interested in whether Plan 9 should have an
mvdir syscall or not, per se.  I'm more interested in pushing at the
design (hard!) in order to explore its strengths and weaknesses, for
more general interest, particularly with reference to a different
operating system I'm thinking about (not the Hurd) which has no
particular relation to Unix at all.

Plan 9 attracted interest because of its interesting approach to user
namespaces.  

What do people think of what I said on a different thread, about
having basically the entire structure of the hierarchy be per-user,
rather than just selected mounts?