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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert)
Message-Id: <9501272039.AA00229@cs.weber.edu>
Subject: Re: Am I dreaming?
To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 95 13:39:24 MST
Cc: hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
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.