On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 02:27:17PM -0400, Jude Nelson wrote:
> Hi Hendrik,
>
... (much snipped) (I'm sorry, I hadn't meant to take you away from
vdev for the amount of time it took to write this lengthy and
interesting reply)

>
> An interesting consequence of structuring applications this way is that you
> can trivially solve both network transparency and application distribution:
> simply put the application on an NFS mount (or some network filesystem),
> and run the interpreter on the local client. The application stores
> runtime state as files within its directory hierarchy, so they get
> automatically written to the NFS server. Users could run remote
> applications locally simply by mounting the remote volume and running the
> interpreter on them in-place.

>
> I was considering building such an interpreter as well as and a suite of
> applications for Devuan at some point, after finishing vdev. I was
> thinking of calling it "shui"--both from the concept of "feng shui" (the
> idea of harmonizing everyone with their environment), as well as serving as
> an acronym for "SHell-oriented User Interface".

Sounds interesting. But for applications like ordinary text editing,
it might become a little slow if you end up running a shell script
with every character typed. The idea did seem to work somewhat for
the ancient mail handler MH (if I recall correctly).

But as for the file system ... I wonder if the completely virtual file
system in something like Inferno could help things along -- put more
of the primitive operations into the file itself. Or have I
misunderstood Inferno?

Of course, taking this to its logical conclusion would move the
file system rather seriously in the direction of a typed persistent
objects system, with methods and so forth. A very different beast
from what we're used to.

-- hendrik

>
> -Jude