very simple datastore reimplementation

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 09.05.2008, at 18:11, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
>> FUSE is great, but...
>>
>> It means interoperability must be an explicit planned-in-advance  
>> action:
>> if a datastore is already on a removable device in your pocket, and  
>> you
>> need to access something on a foreign system, you are stuck unless  
>> there
>> is some minimal level of human interpretability of the file system...
>>
>> Instead, you have to dig up a system with FUSE/olpcfs installed, and
>> then copy the files to a conventional file structure.
>>
>> This is the use case that's hard to get around.
>
> Ok, I think I see now where is the misunderstanding.
>
> In the first post in this thread, I tried to explain that this
> proposal would use removable devices in the same way they are used in
> other systems and that the DS would have nothing to do with them:
>
> [...] we get an useful replacement that lacks:
>
> - Support for mounting removable datastores. We have agreed on moving
> to just list the files in removable devices, without the DS having
> anything to do. Although extending the DS capacity with SD cards is an
> interesting feature, it brings many non-trivial issues that make this
> a longer term feature.
>
> [end of quote]
>
> Scott has given some hints about how olpcfs would store files in
> removable devices, and I think that his proposal is sufficient for
> you, right?

I don't think that is what Jim was getting at. I think it's simply  
that if you copy the raw datastore files to another system for  
analysis / recovery / whatever, then that task would be greatly helped  
by readable filenames. A use case would be that Linux does not boot  
anymore but you type in some magic Forth words to copy the datastore  
to a USB drive.

- Bert -