Opaque file objects
From Erights
Problem
- See Virtualized privileged environment.
- In general, a program should not be unnecessarily aware of the non-capability environment around it, in particular absolute paths in the filesystem.
- We would like E to be compatible with actually interacting with a capability filesystem.
Furthermore, we want to accomplish this while still using java.io.File objects in E-on-Java.
Proposal
Currently,
- the file__uriGetter is uniquely the root of the filesystem and has a distinct interface.
- every File object reveals its absolute pathname.
Instead,
- Every directory is equally usable as a root;
file__uriGetter == <file:///> - File objects cannot be asked for their pathnames; instead,
<file:///a>.optUnget(<file:///a/b/c>)returns "/b/c" (or possibly "b/c"), much as a SturdyRef can only be converted to a cap-URL using <captp>.
XXX Write up exactly what the File interface would become.
XXX Write up and crosslink the "file: should use true URI syntax including %xx" issue.
