Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to documentthe idea of what reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why

[Hans Reiser]

Pavel Machek wrote:

> Hi!
>
>  
>
> > Answer: choose obscure names
> >
> > Problem (all credit to Mr. Demidov for identifying this problem, I
> > argued the other viewpoint, and I can only claim the wisdom to know
> > that I lost the argument): names like "..metas" are ugly to new users,
> > who don't really care for languages that use punctuation in their
> > keywords.
> >
> > Answer
> >
> > don't make them too obscure, experienced namespace developers know
> > that the problem of polluting the namespace is not really as big a
> > deal as beginners think it is, and Clearcase and the WAFL filesystem
> > manage to get by just fine, whereas the problem of putting punctuation
> > marks into names and syntax is a big deal for newbies to the system.
> > Name it "metas" not "..metas", and users will never experience it as a
> > real problem, and newbies will never be annoyed by a-rhythmic
> > punctuation.  Note: if Linus disagrees, it is not the most important
> > thing in this design, "..metas" isn't the end of the world.
> >    
>
> What about choosing just "..." instead of "metas"? "metas" is string
> that needs translation etc, while "..." is nicely neutral.
>
> cat /sound_of_silence.mp3/.../author
>
> does not look bad, either...
> 								Pavel
>  
"..." is pretty good, but I think it has been used by others, but I 
really forget who.  I could live with "...", but I think "metas" and 
"..metas" will collide less often.  Apparently Meta is a finnish name or 
something, so Linus does not like it.  The exact string is really not 
very important to me.  I agree that "..." is elegant.

Hans
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