RE: App installation and encapsulation (Was: Tandem Expand)

> The world is a much nicer place if we have a multi-heirarchy, where we
> can express the physical storage location as one heirarchy, the
> ownership as another, and the identity information as another, and all
> of them can be rigidly typed items:
>
> physical location ownership identity class instance
>
> fs/root:home/jeske/my_app users.jeske app/my_app 00
> fs/root:home/jeske/netscape users.jeske app/netscape4.05 01
> fs/root:apps/gcc users app/gcc2.7.0 02
> net/share:apps/gimp users app/gimp 03
>
> That way, when we want to do something like "build the list of
> installed applications, we merely list the "identify class" = "app/*".
>
> I think I've gone on long enough about this, thoughts?

I've cut out a lot of what you said, mostly because I agree with it. It's
kind of interesting, because the company I work for is very Unix-like
in it's resource management for applications. I've been trying for a few
years now to encapsulate all resources into a single file... but this has
been an uphill battle.

That said, I think you have to divide the problem into parts: what the
application sees, and what the user sees. I very much like the idea
of packaging an application, and it's resources, into a single file.
As such, a user should see nothing more than a single file in their
view of the system.

From an application perspective, it is often necessary to have some
naming mechanism for handling resources. For example, in a Japanese
locale, asking for gettext(FOO) (or somesuch call for a resource)
has to be mapped to *some* way of differentiating Japanese resources
from Germans ones from French ones. Ultimately, the system will have
to map to some unique identifier, which is equivalent to a name. At
that level having the application look for

    /app_resources/ja/ui/menu

is as good as a GUID.

I think the point that you were making is that *this* namespace, and that
of the filesystem that the user sees, need to be independent of one another.

With a model like this, how are things like system libraries handled
though?
Received on Wed Dec 2 17:49:04 1998