[openbeos] Re: B_USER_DATA_DIRECTORY?
- From: "Jonas Sundström" <jonas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 23:01:48 +0200 CEST
"Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
> > You should definitely look at http://glasselevator.sf.net. ;)
>
> Okay, I've read it now, and I must disagree
> with it almost in its entirety :)
...
> the RFC in this form is useless and will never
> be accepted.
(for reference)
http://glasselevator.sourceforge.net/
cgi-bin//display_rfc.cgi?show=0003
Yeah, that proposal shows a lack of understanding
of the BeOS design and why it's a good thing.
Replacing the virtual root with a mounted root
is a step backwards.
The desktop is the GUI equivalent of the CLI root
known as "/". Tracker simply hides the root folders
that are mainly there to allow Unix/Posix apps
to run without too much re-writing.
The CLI shows your BeOS partition as /boot
just above "/", in the same way Tracker displays
your Boot volume directly on top of your desktop.
Same thing.
Perhaps in the future we won't need (to think about)
partitions, but in the present, and as long as we want
to dual-boot we have to live with partitions, and the
BeOS way of presenting partitions,
(in both the CLI as well as in the GUI env),
is more noobfriendly than the conglomeration
technique used by, for example, Linux.
(FWIW, the virtual root does not preclude the
mounting of additional partitions as subfolders
anywhere in the tree - as is common in the Unixes,
for when you need or want to give parts of the
fs tree separate quotas, access permissions,
I/O characteristics, etc.)
Unix also has the problem that you would want to
hide as much as possible from the user (in order to
be userfriendly), while still showing everything to
applications, without the applications themselves
revealing the smoke and mirrors. A common API
like Gnome or KDE could do this, but with Unix
desktop GUI APIs being so fragemented
you're bound to get a mixed user experience.
In BeOS, applications use the Open/Save -panels
of the BeOS API, in league with Tracker,
and indeed implemented in libtracker.so, so all
apps show the BeOS world the way Tracker does,
whereas ported Unix applications sometimes
trip up and display the root and places like /tmp,
which aren't meaningful to most users most of the time.
Anyway.
/Jonas Sundström. www.kirilla.com
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