What is the rationale behind std.file.setAttributes ?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/29/13 4:20 AM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 December 2013 at 11:01:05 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
>> Basic OS level file-system I/O support is useful on its own,
>> especially in a systems programming language. You don't need
>> to pull in a whole bunch of dependencies to read a text file.
>
> Yes, it is useful to have good bindings for OS-level apis. However,
> Posix is no longer an adequate abstraction for cross-platform file
> systems. In the cloud or in clusters you mount network drives with other
> properties than a local drive.

Well one question is what other successful designs could we use as 
precedent? I don't know of any successful unified APIs for 
regular/remote filesystems that also allow full local file 
functionality. The closest abstraction I know of is the FUSE-installed 
filesystems, but those adapt foreign file systems to the Posix interface.


Andrei