From: Michel.Drescher@uk.fujitsu.com Subject: Various questions sourcing from external Date: 28 February 2005 14:06:02 GMT To: jsdl Dear JSDL wranglers, I got assigned to relay the following question to the JSDL working group: 1) jsdl:FileSystem A very popular use case for this element is to mount the user's home directory to the execution environment. How do I do that using JSDL? Solution a) - "Magic interpreter" The JSDL snippet would be <jsdl:FileSystem id="Home"> <jsdl:Description>foo</jsdl:Description> <jsdl:FileSystem> and the genie interpreter would recognise the id attribute to mount the execution user's home dir. JDSL goes "Genie in the bottle", if I may say so. ;-) Solution b) - Platform specific incarnation The JSDL snippet would be <jsdl:FileSystem id="Home"> <jsdl:Description>foo</jsdl:Description> <jsdl:MountPoint>/home/mdrescher</jsdl:MountPoint> <jsdl:FileSystem> This solution lacks abstraction since I cannot resubmit that very job to another site where my home directory is mounted to another path (i.e. /users/drescher). Brokering this job is also hardly possible even if I try to mess around with an incredibly large set of jsdl:Profile elements (to match all possible mount points for home directories). Solution b) - adding "abstractable" directories to jsdl:FileSystemType The JSDL snippet would be <jsdl:FileSystem id="Home"> <jsdl:Description>foo</jsdl:Description> <jsdl:FileSystemType>home</jsdl:FileSystemType> <jsdl:FileSystem> This way, JSDL would introduce the "home directory" syntactically. The downside is that $HOME is not a filesystem. But, then, is "tmp" always a different filesystem? Solution c) - Allowing globbing in jsdl:MountPoint The JSDL snippet could be <jsdl:FileSystem id="Home"> <jsdl:Description>foo</jsdl:Description> <jsdl:MountPoint>{$HOME}</jsdl:FileSystemType> <jsdl:FileSystem> or something similar This mechanism would introduce the well-known globbing mechanisms from PERL or the shells like tcsh, bash etc. Solution d) - A revised jsdl:FileSystem element I don't have any idea yet to propose, but personally, I think JSDL would benefit from an abstraction of file systems (like UNICORE or Globus provide). Any thoughts? Cheers, Michel