4 ms·

Though a Unix stalwart, I am finding the developments in PowerShell exciting. In particular, the concept of PSDrives, or filesystems which reside "inside" of a

Though a Unix stalwart, I am finding the developments in PowerShell exciting. In particular, the concept of PSDrives, or filesystems which reside "inside" of a program and which the shell can connect to for standard hierarchical navigation and object/method execution. This makes little sense for a system which strictly adheres to the Unix philosophy, ie., all programs perform one task and are so simple that the concept of a PSDrive would expose nothing that would provide benefit. However, personal *nix, like Windows, now frequently run large GUI applications which would benefit by having their complexity exposed through a PSDrive. Perhaps the open source community is currently working on something like PowerShell's PSDrives, but adoption by the teams producing large apps would be critical to its success. Anyway, the AREXX ports from the AmigaOS era are back again. The world has come full circle.

xiaq 13y ago
> Perhaps the open source community is currently working on something like PowerShell's PSDrives, but adoption by the teams producing large apps would be critical to its success. plan 9 (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/). Virtually all of plan9's system services are exposed as filesystem servers (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html). Some of these may astonish you - a windowing system, a FTP client, an SSH server, an authentication agent... Overall, the system is much simpler than PSDrive - PSDrive providers are full-fledged .NET objects, plan9 FS are just directory structure plus text files. Yet they achieve roughly the same thing. (Actually plan 9 does more, but I believe in principle PSDrive can be used to do these as well.) Similar things (exposing system service as fs) is actually possible in Linux or BSD, with FUSE. You can actually wrap utilities and expose them as file servers, and there has been some limited success. But as long as upstream utilities are not adopting the FS as the primary API (which is unlikely), I don't think it's really going to take off.

xiaq 13y ago

> Perhaps the open source community is currently working on something like PowerShell's PSDrives, but adoption by the teams producing large apps would be critical to its success. plan 9 (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/). Virtually all of plan9's system services are exposed as filesystem servers (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/man/4/INDEX.html). Some of these may astonish you - a windowing system, a FTP client, an SSH server, an authentication agent... Overall, the system is much simpler than PSDrive - PSDrive providers are full-fledged .NET objects, plan9 FS are just directory structure plus text files. Yet they achieve roughly the same thing. (Actually plan 9 does more, but I believe in principle PSDrive can be used to do these as well.) Similar things (exposing system service as fs) is actually possible in Linux or BSD, with FUSE. You can actually wrap utilities and expose them as file servers, and there has been some limited success. But as long as upstream utilities are not adopting the FS as the primary API (which is unlikely), I don't think it's really going to take off.