Date: Fri, 27 Jan 95 13:39:24 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: Am I dreaming? Message-ID: <9501272039.AA00229@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199501271800.KAA23617@freefall.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 27, 95 10:00:56 am
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> 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? You *could* do it with portals. Specifically, you'd probably have to take advantage of POSIX and use something like //ftp:... as the link target, then wire it from there. This does not seem to be very worthwhile a pursuit. Especially as your company sells CDROMS to the netless masses, where it would be totally irrelevant anyway. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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