On Sat, 12 Aug 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The UNIX notion of "everything is a file" is a thing of beauty. Plan-9
> took it further, and I'm a staunch believer in things like /proc etc. I
> don't think resource forks are anything special.
Unlike Plan 9 we have a userland that Should Not Be Broken(tm). And we
have this "POSIX-compliant" thing too... Linus, POSIX has a lot of nasty
words about mixing files and directories. And I'm afraid that saying "no,
foo is file, it just happens to have children" won't work - that way you
are going to screw a lot of userland stuff.
Again, the _real_ problem is to give a reasonable semantics to unlink(),
remove-on-last-close, rename() and rmdir() for these beasts. Give me that
and I'll do VFS support Real Fast(tm). I propose a cop-out - let mount()
do the job. Then _all_ problems go away, since dubious operations are
automatically prohibited. If you have something better in mind - go ahead,
tell what you want.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 15 2000 - 21:00:28 EST