Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[Hans Reiser]

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>  
>
> > For one thing _I_ didn't decide about xattrs anyway.  And I still
> > haven't seen a design from you on -fsdevel how you try to solve the
> > problems with files as directories.
> >    
>
> Hey, files-as-directories are one of my pet things, so I have to side with 
> Hans on this one. I think it just makes sense. A hell of a lot more sense 
> than xattrs, anyway, since it allows scripts etc standard tools to touch 
> the attributes.
>
> It's the UNIX way.
>
> And yes, the semantics can _easily_ be solved in very unixy ways.
>
> One way to solve it is to just realize that a final slash at the end 
> implies pretty strongly that you want to treat it as a directory. So what 
> you do is:
>
> - without the slash, a file-as-dir won't open with O_DIRECTORY (ENOTDIR)
> - with the slash, it won't open _without_ O_DIRECTORY (EISDIR)
>
> Problem solved. Very user-friendly, and very intuitive.
>
> Will it potentially break something? Sure. Do we care? Me, I'll take that 
> kind of extension _any_ day over xattrs, that are fundamentally flawed in 
> my opinion and totally useless. The argument that applications like "tar" 
> won't understand the file-as-directory thing is _flawed_, since legacy 
> apps won't understand xattrs either.
>
> Oh, add a O_NOXATTRS flag to force a path lookup to only use regular
> directories, the same way we have O_NOFOLLOW and friends. That allows
> people to see the difference, if they care (ie a file server might decide
> that it doesn't want to expose things like this).
>  
I think we should require people to care enough to supply an O_NOMETAS 
flag to see the difference.

> I never liked the xattr stuff. It makes little sense, and is totally 
> useless for 99.9999% of everything. I still don't see the point of it, 
> except for samba. Ugly.
>
> 		Linus
>
>
>  

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