Re: [9fans] Easiest way to make a filesystem

["roger peppe" <rogpeppe@gmail.com>]

On Jan 14, 2008 9:29 PM, Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote:
>   I've been thinking about the same thing for quite some time now (and
> don't you suspect that I have any real suggestions here, more like a
> bunch of pet peeves). I guess my personal feeling of cognitive
> dissonance comes from the fact that I can do pretty much anything in
> Plan9 in a more or less simple shell script, but I can't easily "share"
> the service of the shell scripts via namespace abstraction.

in fact, in inferno at least, one can do a reasonable amount
with sh-file2chan(1), memfs(1), bind(1) and export(1). it's good for
putting things together on an ad hoc basis, at any rate.

for a plan 9 example, pipefile(1) is a tiny program that is constructed
similarly - the bugs section says it "should be rewritten to be a
user-level file system".
the problem is that if that was done, it would be probably three times the size.
there's such a step change from the small (but useful) things that can
be thrown together out of existing parts to writing a full-blown file server.

it's probably a pipe dream, but every time i launch into the
grunge work involved in writing a proper file server, i find myself
wishing there was something
a little more straightforward.