CChrister Weinigel wrote:
>
> rothwell@holly-springs.nc.us wrote:
>
> > What's the point in making apps written before streams existed work
> > with streams unmodified?
>
> Mostly because there exists a lot of backup tools that are hard to
> replace. If the rest of the company uses a backup server which
> supports POSIX file systems you won't be very popular if you insist on
> a special tool to back up your partitions, and lots of backup clients
> aren't open source and thus can't be fixed.
The two backup systems we use make use of "tar" and "ufsdump".
I understand that some systems use proprietary backup agents.
However, this is Linux we're talking about. If you want to
mount NTFS as your native partition, then you probably don't
need backups, because you're crazy. And the "default" filesystem
-- ext2 -- doesn't support EAs or streams.
For systems running streams-capabile filesystems, there will be
versions or tar, pax, and fsdump that will work, I'm sure. The
tar and pax people are already talking about doing it *anyway*,
I think.
> > Files with streams are not directories. I would not expect
> > readdir() to work on them. There would have to be a different
> > enumerator function.
>
> Why change everything? Inventing a new API means that _all_ tools
> have to be rewritten to work with alternate streams.
Mmm. Yes, but is file=(file+directory) the right way to present it?
It means than the file will respond properly to tests to see if
it's a directory. So tools will end up thinking that it *is* a
directory.
-M
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 15 2000 - 21:00:34 EST