On Thu, 2004-03-18 at 19:40 +0200, Murat Demirten wrote: > I'm just thinking about future of Gnu/Linux desktop systems. We have to store > some package specific metadata into filesystems. Package management must be > done in filesystem level (probably a network file system). If file foo > belongs to package bar, filesystem must be aware of this. There may be lots > of advantages, just an example: You are a desktop user, and Openoffice is not > installed on your system. You've got an email, which contains an excel > document, and you have to see it as soon as possible. What must we do? > Downloading whole Openoffice package about 50+ MB? But your friend near by > you, has openoffice installed. You just want to an excel viewer. So, why we > can't use excel viewer of your friend? It can be done automatically (with > proper authentication setup) and your Gnu/Linux system browse the whole local > network, finds installed excel viewer applications and downloads them, > install them and you can look at the excel document. Or, if finds any excel > viewer, it does not necessary to install, it opens the document on your > friend's computer and it takes only X output. A short overview of what we have been discussing in desktop-devel-list at GNOME is, the filesystem layer in current UNIX implementation is not ready to do so. And actually, current implementation of MIME system worldwide is not designed to handle this (your mail agent will need to include more `metadata` about the file attached to the message you will be sending). So it's just, you know, the future :) Anyway, probably future will bring more, as it did in the past. Hopefully Internet will be _A LOT_ faster, so there'll be no difference between downloading the file from your friend and a Debian mirror on the Internet. Just like the processing power evolution, communication speed will probably increase, dramatically. -- __________ | | | | Enver ALTIN (a.k.a. skyblue) | | Software developer, IT consultant | FRONT | |==========| FrontSITE Bilgi Teknolojisi A.Ş. |_____SITE_| http://www.frontsite.com.tr/
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