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

[Helge Hafting]

Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 12:09:52AM +0200, Robin Rosenberg wrote:
>  
>
> > Maybe file/./attribute then. /. on a file is currently meaningless. That does 
> > not avoid the unpleasant fact that has been brought up by others (only to be 
> > ignored), that the directory syntax does not allow metadata on directories.
> >    
>
> *Not* that I am endorsing the idea of being able to access metadata
> via a standard pathname --- I continue to believe that named streams
> are a bad idea that will be an attractive nuisance to application
> developers, and if we must do them, then Solaris's openat(2) API is
> the best way to proceed --- HOWEVER, if people are insistent on being
> able to do this via standard pathnames, and not introducing a new
> system call, I would suggest /|/ as the separator as the third least
> worst option.  Why?
>  
What's wrong with using / as the separator?  It is already
used to separate components of pathnames.  Named streams
are very much like files in a subdirectory.

This scheme makes for very little change to existing tools,
users may then do a "gimp somefile/icon.jpg"  for example.
Or "ls somefile/*" to see all the named streams/forks.

Helge Hafting
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