[ge-talk] Files as Messages

[Martin Caron]

I don't hate the idea at all.  It fit my "the more we generalize the 
better" moto.  But it would require change to the BMessage itself so 
that you can't fill all ram with a message and stuff like that i guess.

First, a stardard BMessage container would need to be conceived.  Also 
the BMessage would need to be parsable before loaded.

It would make a consequent "package" system that was talked a lot (and 
perhaps that idea was also bring then and i forgot).

Another problem is files from other systems.  But BeOS already have 
native stuff and posix stuff, so why not a more native file system.  
The way i understand what you mean would be to make it a universal 
container that happen to be of the BMessage flavor.

Some neat stuff can happen in such a system, for exemple you could send 
a BMessage to a file directly (conceptually of course).

Some issue arise in the case of heavy file manipulation, some overhead 
can happen, but at the same time it would force developer to do less of 
those and more work into memory, someting i would not hate as big file 
should be kept for media manipulation only.

Another problem is the legacy crust that might happen.  If error from 
the original standard get felt later, it would be needed to have a plan 
to still be able to read those file (as file have always been pretty 
flat stucture so far for systems).

I guess this idea is lot more complex than it seem, the BFS guys might 
give lot more detail.  I think this come real close to subject like 
XML, database file system and stuff like that.

> Hi all,
> 
> Long time with no activity on the list, so I thought I'd put forward 
> a 
> quick and random thought. What if we treated all files as flattened 
> BMessages? Attributes could be thought of as fields of the message 
> and 
> the data could be considered to be a special, 'magic' field.
> 
> I honestly have no idea what this could be useful for, but it sounded 
> interesting after 5 hours of driving and there hasn't been any 
> posting 
> for a while :)
> 
> - Danny
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