Warp wrote:
>   What do you *need* directories for? Useless. Just use a naming convention.

BTW, most microcomputer OSes, including DOS and CP/M and MacOS didn't have 
directories.  So, yeah. :-)

>   If we start dropping everything that is not absolutely necessary, we could
> get a pretty bare-bones system.

You'd have FORTH, I expect. ;-)

>   Have you ever heard of "shortcuts" in Windows? They are like a poor-man's
> symbolic link.

Thinking on this, one primary difference is that shortcuts don't 
*automatically* get followed if the program doesn't specifically prevent 
that. I'm not sure that's as useful as the ability to have one file that 
acts as a reference to another file.

See, here's my thinking. Given that people don't really type long paths on 
Windows very much (at least not as much as UNIX), having a program follow a 
link like that automatically doesn't especially seem helpful, especially if 
it points to a file system with different semantics (like a network share, 
say). Pretty much all but the simplest programs on UNIX have to handle 
symlinks anyway, whether they're recursing a directory (like find or grep or 
backups or whatever) or whether they're just moving files around (like "mv" 
needing to know if it's the same file system or not). A user on Windows 
tends to launch a shortcut and it comes up in a window, whether it points to 
a file or a directory or something. If they're navigating, they're doing it 
one step at a time, so having it happen automatically in the middle of a 
path doesn't seem as useful in that situation.  But maybe usage patterns 
would be different if they were around earlier, sure. Shortcuts were clearly 
a hack to support not having a huge PATH variable that grew into a more 
general mechanism over time.

(BTW, Windows2000 supported junction points, which are the higher-level 
abstraction on which mounted file systems and symbolic links and remote 
files are all based. Again, it just didn't come with the OS, but you could 
buy programs that did it.  Just FYI.)


>   (Yes, go on an rant about how these "shortcuts" are so much infinitely
> better than symbolic links. 

BTW, I'm not the one "ranting". I'm discussing stuff rationally, I think.



-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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