Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[Christophe Saout]

Am Donnerstag, den 26.08.2004, 10:12 -0400 schrieb Rik van Riel:

> > I think Hans is not planning turning old "file is a stream of bytes"
> > into eight-stream octopus. One stream will remain as a 'main' one,
> > which contains actual data. Others will keep metadata, etc...
> 
> This is exactly what the Samba people want, though. 
> 
> Office suites can store a document with embedded images
> and spread sheets "easily" by putting the text, the
> images and spread sheets all in different file streams.

Ouch.

I think Hans' idea is (I don't know if it is a good idea nor if it is
doable, but at least it sounds interesting) to have special compound
files where you can do something like this:

cp text.txt test.compound/test.txt
cp image.jpg test.compound/image.jpg

And if you read test.compound (the main stream) you get a special format
that contains all the components. You can copy that single stream of
bytes to another (reiser4) fs and then access test.compound/test.txt
again.

The only thing I'm worrying about with this approach is what happens if
someone tries to simultaneously open test.compound and
test.compound/test.txt.

Hans has an example somewhere where he does something like that
with /etc/passwd.

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