[vos-d] vobject namespace

[Reed Hedges]

How is this different than the way things currently are?

Are you proposing to require that all objects except one special root 
have at least one parent?  Or just to encourage that practice for most 
objects?

Reed

Peter Amstutz wrote:
> I just wanted to float another idea for a change in s4 to s5.  
> Previously in s4, there was no well defined "root" of the vobject tree.  
> Or rather, there was the site root, but listing the contents of this 
> root would get you every vobject on the site, which was rarely what you 
> wanted.
> 
> I'm thinking that it would be useful to have a well defined root, 
> similar to the unix file system root, and for vobjects on the site to be 
> treated sort of like inodes.  This has a few advantages: it is simpler 
> to "mount" conventional filesystems onto the VOS namespace, and it is 
> easy to identify "named" (accessable via the root) and "unnamed" 
> objects, and to garbage collect the latter since we found that 
> long-running sites had a tendency to build up cruft in the form of 
> discarded unlinked vobjects.
> 
> A vobject would now be describable as either a literal identifier like 
> vos://interreality.org/$88FA3483 or with a path like 
> vos://interreality.org/worlds/blocks.  The former would be used 
> internally, the latter would reflect the human and programmatic layout 
> of a VOS site.
> 
> VOS reflective structures would be linked as branches off the root, such 
> as the list of vobject types, and sitewide configuration parameters 
> (like what plugins are loaded).  So you could browse 
> vos://interreality.org/types/namespaces/core to get a list of all 
> vobject types present in the "core" namespace.  Or you could browse 
> vos://interreality.org/etc/plugins to get a list of plugins.  This would 
> be well defined so that these structures are available on any site.  
> 
> Child links would be like hard links in a Unix file system, except that 
> we'll maintain the "parent" list, so you can actually tell who's 
> pointing to a particular vobject.  I suppose in this scheme a hypercard 
> would be like a symbolic link.
> 
> The basic model of the child list as associative list would be 
> unaffected.  Also, this is extremely easy to implement, since the code 
> for parsing and following paths is more or less the same either way.
> 
> [   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
> [Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
> [ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
> [ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]
> 
> 
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