[Oberon] filesystem with directories ?

[John Drake]

--- Thomas Frey <thomas.frey at alumni.ethz.ch> wrote:

> > 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.

Hmmm...that's intersting.  So I take it AosHTTPServer
assumes the "last" "." is the one not to convert?
What I mean is:

my.folder.structure.file.html

Becomes

/my/folder/structure/file.html

Rather than

/my/folder/structure/file/html

Anyway, that still doesn't cover what I was talking
about with regards to user permissions.  Unless
there's someway in AosHTTPServer to assign
certain permissions to any file prefixed
with my.folder.structure.


> Without folders or equivalent one easily gets 10000s
> of lines that look like:
>
Prefix1.Prefix2.Prefix3.Prefix4.Prefix5.Prefix6.Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name1.Text

In theory yes.  In practice?  Not typically.  
I think one of the reasons computers often have
such deeply nested file structures is....because
you can have such deeply nested file structures.
There have been many times I've "drilled down" 
many levels deep only to find a single file, 
or worse an empty folder.

Remember the example I gave of Leonardo.Text?
Someone could structure that as:

/Program Files/Leonardo/Documentation/Readme.Text

but is that REALLY necessary?

> Which makes finding stuff not exactly simpler.

Finding something in:

/Prefix1/Prefix2/Prefix3/Prefix4/Prefix5/Prefix6/Prefix7.Prefix8.Prefix9.Name1.Text

isn't exactly simple either.  

> 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 

Only if you make the user interface look like 
folders.  I often use "Prefix.*.Suffix" from
the Documents.Panel.  It looks nothing like
folders (to me anyway).  I find (pardon the
pun) this a faster way to find stuff than
"drilling down" in folders.  I like the fact
that Plugin Oberon shows all the files in
the "Directories" list as together in one
list.  

(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)

True.

> 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.

Again, from my own experience, many "file folders"
could go away with a little forethought.
 
> 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 "."

And what would that really show?  There's a
lot on my Windows box that's not part of MY
directory structure.  (i.e. everything under
C:\Program Files)  I typicially don't have
folders more than 4 deep for things I set
up myself.

Regards,

John M. Drake

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