What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Robert Cousins]

In article <4438 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <40062 at cmcl2.NYU.EDU>, edler at cmcl2.NYU.EDU (Jan Edler) writes:
>> We've been a bit indecisive about the exact form of pathname
>> extension.  My current preference is to say that "/@" at the beginning
>> of a pathname, followed by a file descriptor number (as a string of
>> digits) and a "/", means to take the object referred to by the file
>> descriptor as the search starting point.

>This is an intriguing idea. I, myself, would prefer to make '@' by itself
>at the beginning of a file name a special token. This solves the problem
>of files beginning with @ in /tmp...

>I'd generalise it beyond directories, too. That way you could open '@5' to
>clone a descriptor. This is similar to the /dev/fd/5 syntax described by
>people using more recent bell releases, except that you can't chdir to
>/dev/fd/5/workdir.

>-- 
>Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

>Business: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter at ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.
>Personal: ...!texbell!sugar!peter, peter at sugar.hackercorp.com.

AOS/VS from Data General has the concept of default files.  These files
being with the character @ and are "special."  Whenever a program attempts
to open @output, the OS converts this file name to an already established
file name (the terminal by default).  However, the value of @output can
be changed at the CLI (shell) level.  This serves a function similar to
a cross between environment variables and I/O redirection.  It is, however,
VERY useful for many tasks.

Perhaps a better solution would be to use some special character to 
signal a non-filesystem request to be passed to a another task.  THis
would allow special filesystems to be implemented as dedicated tasks
and then used transparently.  The task would simply initialize and then
advertise itself to the OS in some standard fashion.  Special networks,
unique hardware and all manner of new features could be built on top 
of the current semantics then.  To do this, however, I would suggest
something of the form:

	<specialcharacter><specialtaskadvertisedname>/<path>

so that path semantics can be clearly used along with multiple
adversting tasks.

Just my $.02 worth.

Robert Cousins
Dept. Mgr, Workstation Dev't.
Data General Corp.

Speaking for myself alone.