[Swift-devel] direct mode

[Michael Wilde]

On 8/7/14, 8:56 PM, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> ...
> It is fairly easy to implement a manual direct mode, where one would use
> direct:// in the mapper file specification. This requires a modification
> of filename()/filenames(), as well as skipping the staging of files with
> direct://.
Following up on this discussion from yesterday's meeting:

On re-thinking this: I can see the value of the direct:// prefix, 
especially if its prepended to the filename using a function, eg:

file f <direct("/etc/group")>;

This is preferable to the current practice of using strings instead of 
files for direct access, as it preserves automatic dependency processing.

This would be used when some files (e.g., large files that should be 
moved to a site once per run) need to be handled differently than the 
site's default data management strategy.

This could generalize by giving each data management stratetegy a name; 
each site would have a default strategy declared in the site entry, and 
each file could get a different strategy by specifying a prefix, either 
in the filename URL protocol field or in the URL via a function like 
"direct( )", above.

Thoughts?

- Mike