Date: Mon, 05 May 1997 14:36:41 +1200 From: physmsa AT cantua DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz (Mr M S Aitchison) Subject: Re: opendos daily digest for 02 May 1997 To: OpenDOS AT delorie DOT com Message-id: <199705050236.OAA20559@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> Precedence: bulk Somebody (?) quoted Tim Bird: >> Some attributes that I think it would be interesting to have include: >> - for a directory, aggregate disk space of all my descendants >> - owner, group, access control list, etc. >> - package I belong to >> - security signature > >Is this not covered by the owner/group information? The security signature is better in a world where files are moved around - it isn't good enough to say that this file is owned by user 500 because on different systems that tape or diskette could be read by somebody else. I think what Tim is saying is good - especially because the emphasis isn't on a long list of attributes somebody, somewhere might want but on a flexible system where more (special) attributes can be installed as an afterthought. DOS has been dogged by people making assumptions that turned out to be limitations in the long run (e.g. 640 Kb, 8+3, and even 64Kb). The answer isn't to get every computer-related company in the world to sit down and list what they want, but to have a system that can be extended later (and just for those who need it). I'm not worried about the resource-fork example (of one system having *so* much more possibilities that transferring files out of it is a pain), but I do think we have to be careful about viruses/trojans. Directory entries can be sorted on the FAT partition's disk dir space at the moment (e.g. Norton's DS command), but that is only one sort key; a good database would have multiple index files (based on what people need to sort by often). This is do-able, quite easily as an add-on to FAT but very nicely in a new file system. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Aitchison, Physics & Astronomy \_ Phone : +64 3 3642-947 a.h. 3371-225 University of Canterbury, (/' "??" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------