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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Against the system:/, media:/ and home:/ namespaces
From:       "R.F. Pels" <ruurd () tiscali ! nl>
Date:       2005-07-11 0:35:29
Message-ID: 200507110235.30829.ruurd () tiscali ! nl
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On Sunday 10 July 2005 22.22, Luke Sandell wrote:

>> Why the hell are we moving away from standard UNIX paths, and inventing
>> another arcane proprietary path/resource location system?
>
> Because the UNIX filesystem is incomprehensible to the average user. 

I'd say that drive letters and the havoc they play on settings is totally 
incomprehensible to the average user too. Why give them a letter? 

> No casual user is ever going to understand the idea of a single root
> directory, or the concept of "mounting" filesystems. Unfortunately,
> Windows-style drive letters and synchronous access (that actually works)
> are probably not going to be introduced on UNIX anytime soon, and so there
> is no way to solve this except abstracting it away.

Oh bah. You seem to equate 'average user' with 'average Windows user'. Well, 
let me say that the average Windows user is quite well acquainted with 
mounting drives. It's not called that, but it quite the same story.

> 2) there is no userspace mounting on Linux, even if the user has ownership
> of the device node, so hot-pluggable devices cannot be utilized except by
> first mounting them as root or setting them up in fstab, which completely
> defies the definition of "hot-pluggable". It is also no possible to mount
> such things as ISO images in userspace, which if were possible could be a
> great feature for KDE.

SORRY????

> 3) the floppy drive must always appear in media:/ on PC systems, even when
> no disk is present, because there is no way to tell if there is one
> present. Thus, CD-ROMs and other non-hot-pluggable devices should always
> appear in media:/ as well for consistency.
>
> 4) it is possible for a PC user to remove a floppy disk before it is
> unmounted.

That's not typical for UNIX...

-- 
R.F. Pels,  3e Rompert 118,  5233 AL  's-Hertogenbosch,  The Netherlands
+31736414590       ruurd@tiscali.nl        http://home.tiscali.nl/~ruurd

 
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