The feel of a LispM/List of running machines

[Luca Pisati]

Chris Bitmead uid(x22068) wrote:
> 
> >    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.

Not at all.  Under Unix Emacs is simulating a versioning number.
Which means that the newest file has NO number.

On the Symbolics versioning is PART of the OS, and the newest file
is simply the highest number.

Small details, but big difference in workflow.

> >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.

--
Luca Pisati		       Voice:	 (310) 577-0518
Nichimen Graphics	       Fax:	 (310) 577-0577
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