Re: Resources (Re: Sed)

[toddpw@cco.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

vandry@CAM.ORG (Phillip Vandry) writes:

>If you assume users are going to do stupid things you are (1) insulting
>the user's intelligence (2) limiting yourself to novice-safe systems.

What?? Users WILL do stupid things. Even smart users occasionally screw up
and have to recover. The least you can do is make it easier for them to
figure out what went wrong.

>By that philosophy,. you'd better not make a program because the user
>might delete it! That philosophy is too Mac-ish.

Nah. If the program is gone, you can't run it and that's apparent right
away. But if you delete the title page and don't install a new one, or
it has the wrong format and the program doesn't have whatever extra logic
is needed to handle that, BOOM! That's REAL friendly.

>data in seperate files allows for flexible configuration. Like I said
>in csa2, if you don't like the title page delete the file "Title.Page".

So do resources, if you have a tool to edit them. You seem to be judging
resources solely on the basis of rez. That is not enough to condemn them.
Do not smack resources until you have used a proper set of tools (like
derez along with rez, Genesys, Design Master, or Foundation).

>Look at GS/OS. Is it all in one file or is it a lot of files? (GS.OS,
>Start.GS.OS, Drivers/*, FSTs/*, etc...). Follow its example.

For thousands of little teeny objects? Get real. The file system overhead
would bloat your application so fast it'd be insane.

>With that kind of a setup you can just delete modules of a program you
>don't want to save disk space (if the program reacts apropriately to a
>missing file).

Sure, so what if you delete something the program needs? In principle, you'd
like the program to exit somewhat gracefully if it hits a fatal error, but
in reality it can add up to a lot of overhead. Think about the implications
of your "better way" ...

Your stated philosophy is already the status quo on unix. Administrating
unix machines is _loads_ of fun. There are a lot of things that only sorta
work if you don't have lots of files (and permission bits!) set up correctly.
Are you sure you really want that on your home computer?

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ cco.caltech.edu