Dave Howe wrote:

Roy M. Silvernail wrote:

...

I'd thought it was so Microsoft could offer an emulation-based migration path to all the apps that would be broken by Longhorn. MS has since backed off on the new filesystem proposal that would have been the biggest source of breakage (if rumors of a single-rooted, more *nix-like filesystem turned out to be true).

To be fair to MS, that is already here - you can "mount" NFS volumes as subfolders in 2K and above, just like unix. however, MS don't really seem to want to crow about that - just in case someone points out unix did this literally decades ago....

I was thinking more of the rumor that Longhorn's filesystem would start at '/', removing the 'X:' and the concept of separate drives (like unix has done for decades :) ). When I first saw this discussed, the consensus was that it would break any application that expected to use 'X:\PATH'-style filenames or chdrive() (or whatever that lib call to change the default drive is). Someone suggested that MS might ship an emulator to handle translation (at some non-trivial cost in performance, else no one would have an incentive to refactor) until the vendors could rewrite their apps to use the new native filesystem. -- Roy M. Silvernail is roy@rant-central.com, and you're not "It's just this little chromium switch, here." - TFS SpamAssassin->procmail->/dev/null->bliss http://www.rant-central.com