Unified I/O namespace: what's the point?

[Felix Lee]

Submitted-by: flee at guardian.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee)


>On the contrary. syslog is a counterexample. While it is hardly as
>modular as I would like, it shows that (0) an fd-centric model works;

syslog shows the limitations of an fd-centric model.  B News, for
example, writes log entries in the files "log" and "errlog".  You
cannot redirect this into syslog without modifying code.

If syslog existed in the filesystem namespace, you might
	ln -s /syslog/news.info log
	ln -s /syslog/news.err errlog
or maybe even
	ln -s ~/mylog/news.err errlog
and everything would work.

Why should I have to teach all my programs about syslog when I can
just write to a filesystem object instead?
--
Felix Lee	flee at cs.psu.edu


Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 204