Women in Technology

Article:		Why I Stopped Coding and Why I'd Start Again
Subject:		In the language or in the file-system?
Date:		2007-01-18 21:17:34
From:		Paddy3118
If you had an extension to a file system that allowed (using unix as an example), the concept of a link to be extended to url's i.e: ln --url http://paddy3118.blogspot.com/ \ /home/paddy1/blogspot ... to make everything that is served from the url automatically available from /home/paddy1/blogspot/... using normal file access, with the OS dealing with caching etc, then the language(s) don't have to change. - Paddy.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• In the language or in the file-system?
  2007-01-19 01:01:03  peterhickman [View]
  
  
  You could use fuse for this. Just have a script to handle the /mnt/extlibs mount point and let it take you url as the argument. I can't see this being too difficult. Indeed the /mnt/extlibs could just be installed as part of the library search path. You could then do:
  
  import http/www.google.com/code/widgets as widgets
  
  and when the search got to the /mnt/extlibs it would see the http prefix (or whatever convention you used) and get the code.
  
  Works on Linux and Mac and would probably work for Perl and other languages as well.
  

• security problem
  2007-01-20 03:53:37  tbuitenh [View]
  
  
  I was thinking the same, and there is a filesystem that does this, see zero-install.sourceforge.net . The problem is that it can be difficult to put checksums in a path. Without checksums, a malicious developer might replace a library developed by him by something else, and the system won't notice. Sticking PGP signatures to everything, like zeroinstall does, doesn't help, because you want the developer who typed the "include" to do the signing or checksum, not the one who wrote the library.
  
  ... I started writing out all the possible path rules that wouldn't work, but found one that does ...:
  
  /http/foo.com/widget/2.0.1/1234abcdef.py