What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Root Boy Jim]

? From: Leslie Mikesell <les at chinet.chi.il.us>

? Basic unix rwx built-in, plus per-filesystem switch controlling support
? for setuid bits on that fs (allowing user-level mounts of removable media).

One thing I'd like to see is an rwx triplet that applied to root as
well.  That is, if I `chmod r-w' on a given (source) directory, root
couldn't add or delete files in it until he `chmod r+w'ed it.

I would like to see filesystems be able to flip from RO to RW without
un-/re- mounting them. Of course, you'd have to wait for RW activity
to stop, but readers could keep right on reading without having to
close and reopen any such files.

I'd like to see better access to the fs innards. A Root Boy should be
able to mknod a directory into a file, edit it (dired :-), and mknod
it back to a directory. Well, maybe not, but something like it. How
many times have you wanted to do something with inode 347 (like relinking
it when fsck barfed) but couldn't?

I'd like to see better control of mtimes. Often, I care most about
the time the data was last changed. The file is just the container.
Thanks to Mark Weiser, who alerted me to that fact.

But most of all, I'd like to see it soon. GNU will change and evolve,
perhaps drastically in its first incarnations. We won't be able to
have all the whiz-bang features immediately, so perhaps it isn't
quite useful to speculate on what they might be. At this stage, we
need some unifying principles that will carry us far, such as,
`every object will be a file descriptor', or `the kernel will be
small and do message passing', or `scheduling and filesystem I/O
will be done by user-level processes'. Some good ideas from both
flavors of UNIX, MACH, LOCUS, etc already exist. The hard part
is to put them all together into a unified framework.

? Les Mikesell

	Root Boy Jim is what I am
	Are you what you are or what?