[Oberon] filesystem with directories ?

[Thomas Frey]

> The only reason for folders I can think of that
> can't be mimmicked with "dotted" files is when
> you need subfolders for websites (or WebDAV
> as Edgar mentioned).  It is convenient to be
> able to define user access at the folder level
> rather than the file level.

Even that is doable with AosHTTPServer.Mod.
It simply converts the Web "/" convention to a "." convention for
files that start with "public.". (The FTP server was not patched
accordingly but this would not be very complicated either).
There are of course limits with the file length in AosFS.

Without folders or equivalent one easily gets 10000s of lines that look like:
Prefix1.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.Prefix6.Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name1.Text
Prefix1.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.Prefix6.Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name1.Text
Prefix1.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.PrefixC.Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name2.Text
Prefix1.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.Prefix6.Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name1.Text
Prefix9.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.Prefix6.Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name1.Text
Prefix1.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.Prefix6.Prefix7.PrefixA.Prefix9.Name1.Text
Which makes finding stuff not exactly simpler. A user interface could
offer simple ways to filter for Prefix.*.Suffix combinations but then
we are back at something that looks like folders or labels (the user
normally does not care if the implementation uses one list of files or
many in the case of folders. The only thing that matters is how it is
presented and that it works correctly and efficiently)

For the fun of it, I quickly flattened my filesystem into "."
convention filenames.
Some statistical results :
There were 917536 "/"es that were changed to "."s .
The directory listing with these massive filenames alone is now more
than 10MB in size.
Most of the new filenames are less than 165 characters.
Typically the filenames are around 60-100 characters.

If you want to get a feeling of how your own directory structure could
look after a "dotification", you can run the following commands:
Windows NT/XP: dir /s /b > preview.txt
Linux: find / > preview.txt
Then open preview.txt in a text editor and replace "\" respectively "/" to "."

--Thomas