Re: Installer UI advices

[Quentin Mathé]

Le 14 mars 05, à 16:20, Jesse Ross a écrit :

> Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, or maybe this is 
> impossible
> because of different underlying OS's, or maybe there is an easier way, 
> but
> can we locate the files we need to link to, get their inode, and use 
> that
> as a reference? That way we could move the file around and the links
> wouldn't break.

Yes, this is possible not exactly like that but by adding an extra 
level of indirection : you need to create lot of unique identifiers 
(UUIDs) on your computer and map each identifier produced to each inode 
in an index, then you need to have a system with FS notifications like 
Linux kernel inotify to know every time files are kept identical but 
have their inode changed (when you move to another disk, when the file 
isn't local to take basic examples) and in such case take care to 
update the inode bound the file identifier in the index.

Finally with files identifiers you can track the files everywhere and 
you never manipulate paths outside of the shell, back in old Mac OS 
days everything worked like that (this a bit simplistic but :-). Today 
alias are still supported with Carbon on Mac OS X with HFS+ but not 
used system wide (Cocoa doesn't rely on them except for NSDocument 
internally iirc then it is pretty convenient, but it is still a real 
pity Cocoa only supports to manipulates files with "path" semantic).

Quentin.

--
Quentin Mathé
qmathe@club-internet.fr