Path: utzoo!lsuc!ncrcan!brambo!morgan From: morgan@brambo.UUCP (Morgan W. Jones) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Ban the Cloud! (plus sugg. for Workbench) Message-ID: <313@brambo.UUCP> Date: 7 Mar 88 20:16:40 GMT References: <318@jc3b21.UUCP> <1030@silver.bacs.indiana.edu> <43704@sun.uucp> Reply-To: morgan@brambo.UUCP (Morgan W. Jones) Organization: Bramalea Software Inc., Bramalea, Ont. Lines: 38 In article <43704@sun.uucp> cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis) writes: > o Provide some level of file type identification. This can be as simple > as IFF/Binary/Text/Unknown (2 bits) to something more sophisticated. Don't do that! I happen to think that the Unix approach is right. If you want some way to determine what is what, adopt a convention of .iff, .txt, .bin, .wp, etc. If people don't want to follow the convention, or want to process a file as something other than what it is, they can do so at their own risks. Workbench could even strip off the suffixes. >The other reason this is beneficial is that if you do enhance the speed of >icon lookup with an .icons file you can't cache the icons for files that >don't have them. Displaying default icons will still be just as slow as >the current system. Of course default icons always have the DEFAULTX, DEFAULTY >co-ordinates and cannot be snapshotted. Why not just have a .files file in every directory that is simply a listing of all of the files in the directory and maintained by the system. Whenever the system accesses the directory, it compares the date of the .files file to the date of the directory to see if the file needs to be rebuilt, and if so does. Naturally, whenever the system makes a change to the directory it would update the .files file. Also, the .files file could contain the block address of the file block. This scheme allows for quicker access of directories, bypasses the directory scan if you know what you're looking for (which is something that AmigaDos does very well now), and is totally transparent to anything that already exists. And it seems to me that if there is a default icon and someone takes a snapshot of it, it should be made into a real icon. >--Chuck McManis -- Morgan Jones - Bramalea Software Inc. morgan@brambo.UUCP ...!{uunet!mnetor!lsuc!ncrcan, utgpu!telly}!brambo!morgan "These might not even be my opinions, let alone anyone else's."