Kevin Reid at 01:57, 9 February 2011

Kevin Reid — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 01:57:39 GMT

New page

==Problem==

# See [[Virtualized privileged environment]].
# In general, a program should not be unnecessarily aware of the non-capability environment around it, in particular absolute paths in the filesystem.
# We would like E to be compatible with actually interacting with a capability filesystem.

Furthermore, we want to accomplish this while still using java.io.File objects in E-on-Java.

==Proposal==

Currently,
* the file__uriGetter is uniquely the root of the filesystem and has a distinct interface.
* every File object reveals its absolute pathname.

Instead,
* Every directory is equally usable as a root; <code>file__uriGetter == <file:///></code>
* File objects cannot be asked for their pathnames; instead, <code><file:///a>.optUnget(<file:///a/b/c>)</code> returns "/b/c" (or possibly "b/c"), much as a SturdyRef can only be converted to a cap-URL using {{uriGetter|captp}}.

{{XXX|Write up exactly what the File interface would become.}}

{{XXX|Write up and crosslink the "file: should use true URI syntax including %xx" issue.}}

[[Category:Unresolved design issues]]

Opaque file objects - Revision history

Kevin Reid at 01:57, 9 February 2011