barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) (02/26/90)
In article <4555@hemuli.tik.vtt.fi> tml@hemuli.tik.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist) writes: >The context-dependent files in HP-UX is IMHO a rather clever idea. A >bit like Apollo's symbolic links containing environment variables. Is >there any chance of other vendors taking up the idea? I hope not. In networked environments these kinds of things cause serious problems. Not all file server clients are Unix systems, and they don't necessarily have the concept of environment variables. On Symbolics Lisp Machines, which have been accessing network file servers for over a decade, one writes "host:path", and the effect is to access the same file as a user on the host would if he typed that pathname. When it accesses a Unix NFS server it has to go through many contortions in order to access the same file that a user of the Unix system would. It has to read the remote system's mtab or fstab file and interpret automounts relative to the remote host. Now that distributed file systems are so popular, please don't add more attributes that make it hard for non-Unix systems to access files. -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar