Guido van Rossum wrote:
[... horrors of cross-OS mounts and ":\/" separators ...] I agree, this has some very hairy sides to it. But VFS is really more about mounting non-FS things in a "root" FS (presumably the real one).
On the other hand the VFS concept could be used as a totally different solution to the sys.importers vs. sys.path
Heck, I'll be the "enfant terrible" once more: yes, and this stuff could well be implemented generically across scripting languages. Of course the act of "importing" is a very Pythonic issue - but FS/VFS traversal and the actual shared library load need not be. Anyway, enough of that.
Take for example the Windows registry -- looks a lot like a filesystem, doesn't it? Yet it has one fundamental property that a typical FS doesn't: directory nodes can have data *and* children...
What you're saying is that dir = set-of-subdirs + set-of-files, and that this is a more general requirement than plain FS's. Doesn't that simply mean that the more general model is needed as basis to handle both?
Trees are a universal concept, but code sharing is still elusive...
Ah, but think of the implications: archives, networks, XML, the world! -- Jean-Claude