Re: Floppy handling

Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.org)
Sat, 10 Jun 2000 09:47:03 -0600 (MDT)


I've been looking at implementing msdos filesystem support in the GNOME
VFS (virtual filesystem) layer. This way users could be given read and
write access to the device (eg: /dev/fd0) and the filesystem stuff
would happen at the library level. This wouldn't be as fast (due to the
lack of caching) and would only be available to GNOME programs, but I
think its a solution to the problem.

Despite my loyalty to GNOME (as a part of the GNU Project), on
technical grounds I have to disagree. File access needs to be
available to all the programs on the system, and the only natural way
to do that is through the kernel and the C library. Doing this in
GNOME will produce a feature that half-works, which means it will
appear to the users as an unreliable feature.

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