Comment 10 for bug 1659027

I think we need a clear idea of how to work with streams and how different stream data might be handled. In the past, networked virtual directories were popular for local nets but of course the data rates can be very high. If we plan to pull things off the internet I think we need to think about how to manage data usage; what to transfer and when, and how to handle situations where the remote data is no longer there. For many programs, streams must also be seekable. We can break so many things in a very bad way and I'm not currently convinced that the github retrieval of footprints works in a reasonable way. Features are nice, but if they introduce too many additional failure mechanisms we've got to put more thought into things.