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From: ralphw@ius2.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.6809,net.micro.68k,net.micro
Subject: Re: CD ROMs to use 68000 OS9 (or DEC Files-11)
Message-ID: <333@ius2.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 18-Apr-86 14:15:28 EST
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Posted: Fri Apr 18 14:15:28 1986
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In article <17347@rochester.ARPA> crowl@rochester.UUCP (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
>DEC is also pushing a standard for CD-ROMS.  It is a file system based
>on their Files-11 file system.  See the April 1986 issue of Mini-Micro
>Systems.  My one comment is that DEC's [dir,dir,dir]file.ext naming
>scheme is not as good as the Unix /dir/dir/dir/file.ext naming scheme.  
>It tends to cause problems for name aliasing schemes.  You also have
>to hunt down the [] keys.

The file naming scheme should be completely independent of the actual
representation of files and internal filenames (which can use non-ASCII
characters for internal delimiters) in the filesystem.

A reasonable filesystem should allow for many naming systems (especially
delimiters, including '[,]' (VMS), '/' (Unix, Apple ProDOS), '\' (MSDOS),
or '<.>' (Tops-20), although typically only one user interface is provided.

Hierarchical, tree-structured filesystems are 'in' now, but what about the 
more general digraph format, where a file or directory can be in more than one
directory?  (Unix sort of does this, but there is only one parent directory
at each point in the tree, referenced by ..).
If done properly this could solve the symbolic link semantics problem in Unix
(cd through a link, then cd .. puts you somewhere you didn't expect to be).

The user interface issues are more complicated, but that shouldn't prevent
designers from building the digraph capability (my personal favorite) into
the filesystem.



-- 
					- Ralph W. Hyre, Jr.

Internet: ralphw@c.cs.cmu.edu (cmu-cs-c.arpa)	Usenet: ralphw@mit-eddie.uucp
Fido: Ralph Hyre at Net 129, Node 0 (Pitt-Bull) Phone: (412)CMU-BUGS