Please, don't lecture me about the Hurd being perfect; it's not. Trust me, I won't lecture you about that, but I might lecture your about how unperfect it is.
A friend at the AI lab once gave the following dream as an example of a well-functioning system: It all sounds like a Lisp Machine... And even though I enjoyed your little story, it has zlich todo with filesystems and user interactions. You walk up to the workstation and start a complex memory intensive ray-tracing program. It runs out of memory and swap space on the workstation. A dialog pops up informing you of the situation and giving several options: suspend the job until later, kill it, and so forth. (Notice that Unix and the Hurd both simply kill the process or the system here, because the discovery that swap is gone happens so low down that all context has been lost.) I don't know about Unix, but on GNU/Hurd you could suspend the process, then have some gdb magic so you can restart the process in question from a previous point (and it would be nice to be able to patch the process in question with new code, to fix a bug or similar). So the process crashes, you have some little login script that shows you your processes that are suspended/crashed/whatever, fire up gdb see that it was because of non memory, add swap in another terminal, and restart the program from some point This is far simpler then having "dialogs poping up", it also begs the question "where do those dialog windows pop up"; X11? the console? The Hurd's new-fandangled-windowing-system-that-doesn't-exist-yet? All of the above? The reason that filesystems do not have user context is because I was not sufficiently far-sighted at the time to realize the full flexibility of the translator concept I had created. No, it is because they can't have "user context", but feel free to disprove me with some code. Cheers. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
