It may well be that a fine-grained interface isn't practical, but perhaps there are some basics that we could implement, such as
- set owner of this thing - (maybe) set group of this thing - give owner|everyone|?some-group the ability to read from|write to|remove|run this thing - tell me whether any of these is possible - make the metadata for this thing the same as the metadata for that thing - tell me when this thing was created|last updated in addition to the usual CRUD operations. More detailed views of metadata might be the providence of OS-specific modules, as might different semantics for content (and even stringy metadata). But having this sort of simplified works-everywhere layer interposed should handle common tasks like reading, writing, and copying without making everyone replicate OS-specific variants. The basic operations above have a POSIXy flavor, but the underlying details shouldn't. For instance, "allow me to read and write this thing" != chmod 6xx, thing. I'm not saying this is an easy solution, just that it's worth the effort. Then again, I think File::Copy is a better choice than C<system cp> for publicly distributed code, so I'm already biased. -- Regards, Charles Bailey On 12/9/08, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2008 Dec 9, at 19:56, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: >> * Aristotle Pagaltzis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-12-10 01:10]: >>> Well go on. >> >> Btw, I just realised that it can be read as sarcastic, which I >> didn't intend. I am honestly curious, even if skeptical. I am >> biased, but I am open to be convinced. > > > BTW you can run into this issue even only considering Unix/POSIX: > POSIX ACLs, AFS, NFSv4. > > I can see the point of a very simple base API with system-dependent > extensions, but am likewise skeptical that one can be designed that > isn't useless. > > -- > brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED] > system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED] > electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH > > > -- Regards, Charles Bailey Lists: bailey _dot_ charles _at_ gmail _dot_ com Other: bailey _at_ newman _dot_ upenn _dot_ edu
