Linked by Will Varfar on Tue 3rd Aug 2004 05:32 UTC
This article offers feature suggestions to budding OS developers looking for that neat edge.
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It's appealing to be able to mount remote resources (DAV, FTP etc) so that programs that were not designed to access these are suddenly empowered to do so, with ZERO code change.
A flip side of this is that with zero code change, your app cannot cope with a communication problem. A solution to this is the NFS-style hard mount, in which the application is put in IO wait by the kernel until the resource comes back to life.
Which, of course, could take forever. If the mount is not INTR enabled, you cannot even kill the application!
Apple's finder is such an application. It will display a cute beach ball (or spinning wheel?) while you wait. And wait. And wait!
Unfortunately, Finder is very central to the MacOs...
Mind you, other OSes are no better.
All mount types should have a configurable timeout on error (NFS does) and applications should be ready to handle errors. Not as in catch(IOException e) {}
NFS is mostly okay because it lives in campus/enterprise LANs with sysadmins and where latency is not too high.
This breaks down on the internet.