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Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 10:00:56 -0800
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh>
Message-Id: <199501271800.KAA23617@freefall.cdrom.com>
To: hackers
Subject: Am I dreaming?
Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Some may have noticed in the last snapshot that I'd created some seemingly
bogus symlinks of the form:

lrwxrwxr-x  1 root  bin         54 Jan 27 00:39 packages -> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0-RELEASE/packages

Which are indeed bogus from the file point of view, but are at least
informational and show you just where you should go to get the real file.
Since the snaps are in an anon ftp area, I can't just point my symlinks
off to other NFS locations due to the chroot'd nature of it all.

My question is, how hard would it be to make them MORE than informational?
e.g. the system sees one of these URL specs as a filename and auto-fetches
it for you.

I guess this all gets back to the whole `user mode translation of file names'
thing we were talking about awhile back.  It's not the same as portals,
which require a given mount point to be traversed, but rather affects all
files who's names match some sort of selection criteria.  The feature above
would be one very nice application for this.

Any comments?  Am I, as the subject says, simply dreaming?

						Jordan