>From the original post (by RMS):
> Is there any possibility of making Linux handle file
> systems on floppies like MSDOS, so that there is no
> need to explicitly mount and unmount a floppy drive
> in order to access floppies through the file system?
<snip>
> We want to make GNU/Linux appeal to Windows users,
> and this is one of the things necessary to do that.
> And if MSDOS could do this, surely we can.
The problem is the user-unfriendliness of explicitly mounting & unmounting in order to use floppies. Newbies have no idea what `mount' or `umount' are because the distro's installer configures fstab for them. This is a Good Thing. Everyday users don't need administrative knowledge; why lengthen the learning curve?
IMO, the solution to the problem above should:
* Remove the user from internal fs workings
* Be simple
It should NOT:
* Try to squeeze performance out of an inherently
slow medium
* Eat RAM or swap space that may be at a minimum (or
not available at all)
I really don't see the point of all these complex schemes, anyway. In my experience, a floppy disk is rarely used for heavy I/O where kewl buffering techniques might improve performance. AFAIK, the common case goes, "insert disk, read (or write), remove disk"--in quick succession.
Make it easy and minimize the load on system resources. This leads me back to my initial suggestion:
mount, r/w, umount
This isn't as simple as it sounds, and perhaps it belongs on the application level. But we can't make the assumption that the machine has available RAM/swap or that the user won't mind waiting for 1.4MB to be cached when they figure out they've inserted the wrong disk--and they _will_ wait because the light is on. ;-)
(my $.02 US)
-Steve Holdener
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