From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jan 27 13:03:21 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id NAA27445 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 27 Jan 1995 13:03:21 -0800 Received: from kitten.mcs.com (Kitten.mcs.com [192.160.127.90]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id NAA27434; Fri, 27 Jan 1995 13:03:13 -0800 Received: from mailbox.mcs.com (Mailbox.mcs.com [192.160.127.87]) by kitten.mcs.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) with SMTP id PAA09448; Fri, 27 Jan 1995 15:02:59 -0600 Received: by mailbox.mcs.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.28.1 #28.5) id ; Fri, 27 Jan 95 15:04 CST Received: by mercury.mcs.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.28.1 #28.5) id ; Fri, 27 Jan 95 15:02 CST Message-Id: From: fredriks@mcs.com (Lars Fredriksen) Subject: Re: Am I dreaming? To: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 15:02:57 -0600 (CST) 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 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1626 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Jordan K. Hubbard writes: > > 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 > It might be a dream, but a cool one at that. If you could live with a symlink that looks like: flexfax --> /ftp::/sgi.com/..., then you could mount an ftp, http etc filesystem on /ftp, /http etc that would do the trick. Now someone needs to write a ftp/http filesystem. Lars -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Lars Fredriksen fredriks@mcs.com (home) lars@fredriks.pr.mcs.net (home-home) fredriks@asiago.cs.wisc.edu