File system software???
Joe Armstrong
joe@REDACTED
Thu Jun 27 14:11:23 CEST 2002
> I'm left wondering what on earth you want to do which
>
> - you can't do in the normal filesystem, using normal files
>
> - requires you to generate an ordinary filesystem, i.e. not something
> portable like a tarfile or a pkzip archive
>
Just hide all the details from the user.
The otp bases system is several thousand files - If I want to
distribute an application in Erlang I hate having to send out all these files.
Jacob Nielsen makes this point in
http://www.useit.com/papers/filedeath.html
I have reduced this number to 4 (next release of stand-alone Erlang)
but do not have a convenient way of hiding all the dynamically
generated files that an application might use, hence the interest.
Since only my application will use the virtual file system the
format is irrelevant - in the same sense that I don't care if my files
are stored in an ext2 or ext3 file system. There is also an advantage in
not being a zip container etc. I makes it difficult for other people to mess
around with the files though an uncontrolled interface.
/Joe
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