Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!richard
From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: What kind of things would you wnat in the GNU OS
Message-ID: <527@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Jun 89 19:31:50 GMT
References: <19829@adm.BRL.MIL> <6275@cs.Buffalo.EDU> <1748@auspex.auspex.com>
Reply-To: richard@aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 34

>>symlinks: somewhat stupid in the first place, to me.  There are
>>  already normal links.
>
>Which don't work between file systems; if you're going to nuke symlinks
>because you think normal links are enough, you'd better make normal
>links work between file systems (yes, even if the file systems aren't on
>the same machine).

And anyway, it's not universally agreed that symbolic links are just a
substitute for "real" links.  Sometimes the semantics of symbolic links
are the ones you want.  For example, it's nice to be able to make a link
to a file and know that it will always point to the current version of
that file, even if the file is updated by renaming and creation of a new
one.

Symbolic links also have the nice property that you can see what they
point to, e.g.  emacs -> gnuemacs-18.52  (of course, they also have the
property that you can't see whether a file is pointed at, which may be
bad).

Back to the original question of what we'd like in GNU, one thing I
hope it will have is the ability to write user programs that provide
functionality equivalent to devices (one way to do this is to have
something like a fifo that passes through ioctls as well as data).
I assume this will come for free, since it seems to be a current
view that as much functionality as possible should be moved out of
the kernel.

-- Richard

-- 
Richard Tobin,                       JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,           ARPA:  R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.                UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin