A technical assessment of porting "Sugar" to Windows.

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 24.04.2008 20:32, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> 4. Journal and Datastore.
>
> One part of the zooming UI not discussed in item #3 (above) is the
> "Journal" view, the XO's replacement for the traditional "files and
> folders" metaphor.  Our current implementation is based on Xapian,
> which "compiles" on Windows (but perhaps not much more):
> http://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/2006-March/000311.html
>
> That said, our Journal and datastore are in need of a rewrite.  The
> current proposal (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpcfs) is not
> incompatible with a Windows implementation, but the implementation
> strategies on Windows and GNU/Linux would likely be very different.
> The most straightforward course of action would be to have two
> completely separate implementations of the same API.  This course requires
> skilled Windows developers who are comfortable with NTFS reparse points
> and/or filesystem development on Windows.  Developing a single
> implementation which is cross-platform is likely more difficult.
>   

I looked at the OLPCFS page and it became very clear that OLPCFS is
virtually identical to what Reiser4 was initially designed to be. Almost
all of the listed OLPCFS features were present in the first Reiser4
designs and almost all were repeatedly vetoed by the Linux VFS guys (Al
Viro and Christoph Hellwig) for design reasons, not code reasons. So if
you want OLPCFS, try early Reiser4 snapshots (maybe for Linux 2.6.4 or
so) and add one or two features on top of it.

Sorry. I wish the idea would fly, but you may be in for some very tough
criticism if you intend to have anything with a concept like OLPCFS
merged in the Linux kernel.


Regards,
Carl-Daniel