Lispm vs Unix file servers

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Thu, 9 Aug 90 12:25 EDT
    From: PTW@JASPER.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (P. T. Withington)

	Date: Thu, 9 Aug 90 00:03:06 EDT
	From: barmar@Think.COM

	In a .sct hierarchy, that assumption is probably wrong.  No Unix programs I
	know of can deal with directories where all the files have ~version~
	suffixes.  

    Not GNUEmacs?
	       
No.  The convention that GNU Emacs invented (and which is only
implemented by GNU Emacs and Symbolics NFS, as far as I know) is that
the newest version has no suffix, the second newest one has a "~"
suffix, and the rest have ".~version~" suffixes.

	By the way, if Symbolics NFS is supposed to be compatible with GNU Emacs's
	versioning convention, how come it doesn't create "foo~" files?  It goes
	straight from "foo" to "foo.~version~".  This is a pretty annoying
	incompatibility.

    Sounds like a bug to me.  You should report it separately, if you have
    not already.

I probably reported it a few years ago, back when it was still ILA-NFS.
It hasn't been annoying enough to reiterate until it came to me during
this discussion.

	Unix systems are generally better file servers than Lispms are.

    And you don't have to teach your sysop how to backup a LMFS, etc.

I didn't mention backups because Unix's backup software is pretty
primitive, although it's much faster.

    As KMP pointed out in a separate message, a better approach would be to
    campaign to add the needed functionality to Unix directly rather than
    kludge it on the side.  That's not really our place, except as Unix
    customers.  

I think Stallman is planning on having versions and perhaps property
lists in the GNU file system.  Other than that, it seems unlikely to
happen.  Many Unix afficionados think the file system has already gotten
more complex than it should be.
                                                barmar