FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: OT Re: drive letter vs. mounten

["François Revol" <revol@xxxxxxx>]

> "Michael Phipps" <mphipps1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > was really nice when people used removable media a lot), the 
> > concept 
> > of being able > to say:
> > assign vm:  /boot/home/Development/current/src/kernel/core/vm2 
> > is sorely missed by ex-Amigans.
> > 
> > Then say "cd vm:" or "ls -la vm:" would be very nice. Certainly not 
> > an R1 thing. It 
> > would have to be an enhancement to the vfs to hold a hash table of 
> > name-->path 
> > mappings. But it would be very cool.
> 
> "vm:" is part of the root name space - that's what / is for in BeOS 
> and 
> Unix.
> So to do exactly the same as above (including missing persistence):
>       $ ln -s /vm /boot/home/Development/current/src/kernel/core/vm2
ln -s /boot/home/Development/current/src/kernel/core/vm2 /vm
:P
>       $ cd /vm
> 
> Where is the big difference? And why should that not be an R1 thing? 
> :-
> )
> 
> I think the ':' feels a bit different (I still can be counted as an 
> Amiga user), but it's logically the same.
> 
AFAIK (though I never had an Amiga (shame on me)), the "devices", 
called as 
foobar:, were managed by a different process for each of them.
so doing an ASSIGN VM: would actually spawn a new process to manage 
that 
(but maybe that was only for real devices ?) particular device.

In any case, assigns were as volatile as symlinks in an in-memory 
rootfs :)

btw, Amiga ROXOR.
It had a preemptive microkernel when the PC was still trying to add 
a gui on top of DOS =)

François.