[gopher] Re: Heads up

[Thomas Thurman <tjat2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11 Jan 2002, John Goerzen wrote:
> Konq is, AFAICT, the first interface to gopher that really shows it like
> it should be -- as a global filesystem.  You can drag-and-drop, view
> gopherspace as a tree (just as you would your local filesystem), etc.
> The idea is awesome.

Something I'd like to see is a gopher shell extension for Windows,
doing for gopher what TortoiseCVS[1] does for CVS. You'd be able
to mount a gopher tree and treat it like any other drive. I'd
have a go at writing it myself, but I don't have the tools or
the knowledge of MFC.

Hmm. And I wonder how much trouble it would be to have gopher as
a mountable Linux filesystem, a la userfs[2]. Then all Linux
shells and interfaces to the directory system would be able to
see the gopher just the same.

Both ideas are comparable to the way Unix treats devices as files.
We already have some well-understood, well-tested tools to work
with filesystems, so why not leverage that and save us having to
implement things all over again for gopher?

And it's certainly something gopher would do far better than HTTP...

Thomas

[1] http://www.wincvs.org/TortoiseCVS/index.shtml
[2] http://www.goop.org/~jeremy/userfs/