Re: Will Reiser4 support a "hidden" attribute?

[Stewart Smith <stewart@flamingspork.com>]

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 11:58, Guido Schimmels wrote:
> Reiser4? This would be fantastic! I'm planning to use Reiser4 for my  
> Desktop Linux project. I need this feature to hide the Unix legacy tree  
> like MacOS X does it and (back then) BeOS.

Note that MacOS X actually accomplishes this by the GUI having a list
(inside a file named '.hidden') of things not to show.

On my OSX partition, the contents of .hidden is:
automount
bin
cores
Desktop DB
Desktop DF
Desktop Folder
dev
etc
lost+found
mach
mach_kernel
mach.sym
opt
private
sbin
tmp
Trash
usr
var
VM Storage
Volumes


Also, you'll notice that dot files are also hidden it the GUI.

A patch to nautilus to do this would be pretty simple, although then you
get into the problems of hiding a lot of stuff from the user (which you
may not want to).

OSX has the /System and /Library hierarchies that are familiar (enough)
to mac users, and the only parts that are really hidden is all that UNIX
stuff.

Maybe a gnome-vfs layer that interfaced with the packaging system would
make things a bit easier for newbies? i.e. essentially a drag-and-drop
version of apt and dpkg?

If you had a seperate hidden attribute (as well as the dot files
convention) you'd have a lot of old-hat unix people not looking for such
things, and when a 'ls -a' didn't show them, they'd assume they weren't
there. Not good for security.

Although, for things like .snapshot, which are file system provided,
such an approach works fine.