From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:39:01 +0000 From: Eris Discordia To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Subject: Re: [9fans] Do we have a catalog of 9P servers? Topicbox-Message-UUID: 41b8452a-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 The information is very much appreciated here, Erik Quanstrom. > so in plan 9, it's possible to know the device providing the file > (try ls -l /dev), [...] >>From this I gather the client-side caching problem sqweek pointed out can be easily addressed. Caching or no caching can be decided by the provider of the file. And files are "typed"--though not explicitly--because you can tell them apart. --On Thursday, November 13, 2008 9:17 AM -0500 erik quanstrom wrote: >> Not that type of "types." I gave an example (which Charles Forsyth found >> to be a bad one) to set the types of "types" apart. I mean "types" as >> in named pipes ("special" files) versus regular files. In my experience >> which is limited to "modern" UNIX clones, i.e. Linux and *BSD, you can >> distinguish between a number of file "types" and decide what to do >> accordingly. You can tell a directory, from a (character or block) >> device, from a link, from a regular file. These same "types" could, and >> have been, be used to represent some details of the underlying resource. > > actually, unix since early bsd does have file types. (actually, > they derive from different types of file descriptors). for example, > there's a different and disjoint set of operations for sockets. > there are some files that only respond to ioctls. > > so in plan 9, it's possible to know the device providing the file > (try ls -l /dev), but there are no links, there is a pretty strong > namespace (namespace(4)) convention and all files respond to > the same io primatives so what more information do you need? > > - erik >