File system model (was: UnixFileDirectoryPlugin)

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Thu Jan 17 22:53:24 UTC 2002


> As a Gedankenexperiment, without looking elsewhere yet, I'd think that we'd
> want to cover:
> 
> 	1. Multiple data streams
> 	2. Metadata dictionary, e.g., Macintosh resource fork, OS/2 Extended
> Attributes
> 	3. Security properties (ACL, owner, group, file attributes)


The bulk of Squeak is pretty platform-independent.  It would be nice if
files, were too.  Let's keep the generic file interface simple, and then
leave nitty-gritt stuff to platform-specific packages.  Really, if you
are interested in stuff beyond the lowest common denominator, you are
likely to be targetting a specific platform anyway, I would think.  (Tim
wanted to do proper file copies, preserving this extra information;
however, he ended defining a "copy" primitive instead, which turned out
to be a simple and easy solution.)

For now, all we need is one new primitive, and it can even use the
existing DirectoryEntry class for its return value.  Redesigning is
fine, but let's have a purpose.  Simplicity is nice if we can get away
with it, and DirectoryEntry is pretty simple...



-Lex



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