The feel of a LispM/List of running machines

[Chris Bitmead uid(x22068)]

>    Well if you restrict yourself to the LispOS world, then nothing on the
>    Unix side of things should break. They only break when you do things
>    the Unix way.
>
>Wrong.  Sometimes Unix machines just mess up for no frigging reason at
>all.  For instance SDF (the Linux system I gateway my mail through)
>recently rebooted, then fsck cleared its own i-node.  Major catastrophe.

Well there's two issues here. Firstly that it rebooted. Why? Either it
was bad hardware, or it was a bug. Neither of which Lisp is going to
be free of. Secondly it cleared a wrong i-node. Keeping file system
integrity after a crash is a major difficultly that Lisp isn't going
to suddenly solve. The state of the art seems to be log structured
file systems which do run on UNIX.

>The -only- way to get away from unix lossage is to not run unix.

Ok fine. It's a trade off of backwards compatibility versus occasional
unix problems. Since I havn't had problems like you describe in the
last 3 years of running Linux, I'll take the backward compatibility
thank you.

>    In the same way you can build a lisp file system on top of the Unix
>    file system and save some work in the short run, while still providing
>    all the above features that you so desire.
>
>Yeah, all except robustness.  And if it were that easy to add trivial
>features to unix's file system, then tell me WHY does unix still have no
>transparent network file sharing?  

Heard of NFS?

>WHY does unix still have no version
>numbers?  

Emacs has them, and emacs runs on Unix.

>WHY does unix -still- use one-way-ticket-to-hell file
>deletion?  Why why why?

Because the UNIX file system is very low level. Think of UFS being to
file systems what Micro kernels are to OSes. It is a low level
facility on which you can build something better.

>But I'm going along with this write-lispos-on-top-of-linux-first idea
>because as Fare Rideau (I think?) recently said, even the kludgiest lisp
>system is better than a C system.  At least it will give us something
>that mostly insulates us, relatively quick.  I just don't want us to
>lose sight of the eventual goal of 100% lisp.