Re: Directories/Files

[Sean Middleditch <sean middleditch iname com>]

> Sean Middleditch wrote:
>  
> > Hmm, I've never used an Amiga, but that sounds a bit nice.  How does the
> > system differentiate between the labels and actualy directories?
> 
> Well, from the user's point of view, all labels end with a colon (:), so
> I guess that's how the system makes the distinction internally, too.  (I
> can't honestly remember if you're allowed to use a colon in a regular
> filename or directory name on the Amiga-- probably not, I suspect.)
> 

That makes sense.  The problem with GNOME doing something like this
though, however, is it can't be based on that, doing something that
would require the OS to handle it.  GNOME could have just a list of
mountable drives in a drop-down box, and perhaps the personal "Home"
directory, along with the normal directory structure, making using
drives better.  Perhaps an auto-mount feature for those without the
automount daemon, Supermount, or that magicdev thing (if that' still
used).

> Actually, now that I think about it more, this system is quite neat when
> it comes to removable media, too, because you can use the labelling
> system to refer either to whichever disk happens to be in the drive at
> the time (using the drive's system-assigned label, e.g. "df0:"), or to a
> specific disk with a specific volume label (e.g. "WorkbenchDisk2of3:"). 
> Which is quite nice for making sure you don't copy things onto the wrong
> disk and suchlike-- if you type "copy myfile mydisk:" and "mydisk" isn't
> in the one that's in the drive at the time, it'll ask you to insert the
> correct disk first.  (Whereas "copy myfile df0:" will copy the file onto
> whatever disk happens to be in the drive).
> 
> Historically, of course, all this came about because the Amiga
> originally shipped with one floppy drive and no hard disk, so there was
> a lot of disk-swapping to be done!  And this makes that process fairly
> foolproof, as well as being pretty useful for other file management
> jobs.
> 

Ya, that definitely would have made things a lot easier.  ~,^

> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> Calum Benson               Tel: +353 1 819 9771
> Usability Engineer         Fax: +353 1 819 9078 
> Sun Microsystems Ireland   
> http://www.sun.ie          mailto:calum.benson@sun.com