Re: design goals vs mechanisms (was: Re: Let's do some coding :-)

[Michal Suchanek]

On 10/26/05, Marcus Brinkmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> At Wed, 26 Oct 2005 22:43:06 +0200,
> Bas Wijnen <address@hidden> wrote:

> If you want stability, you probably want to do some of the following:
>
> * try formal verification
> * allocate a fixed amount of resources statically up front,
>   instead dynamically at run time.
I kind of dislike this. That is one of the things that is nice in
Hurd/Mach: you have no limit on the size of strings like filenames. I
do not think I would like a filename that has 1M characters, but I do
not know what is the  "reasonable limit" for filename length.
On the other hand, it may be possible to write servers that use bound
amount of their own resources to serve possibly unbound requests for
which the clients supply their resources.
For one I do not see why such names have to be used by the system at
all. The names can be stored as another "content fork", and files can
be identified by some handles. Programs that show the files to users
can then read the name in the same way they would read the data.

> * keep the source code small and simple, to allow easier verification
> * etc

Thanks

Michal Suchanek


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