From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" Message-ID: <87669m91bx.fsf@becket.becket.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: <87het8uxcl.fsf@becket.becket.net>, Subject: Re: [9fans] correcting old failures, and NJ vs MA Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 09:11:29 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 0587a12c-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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?