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

[Horst von Brand]

Helge Hafting <helge.hafting@xxxxxxx> said:
> 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.

/ is separator for directories, POSIX mandates its exact use. No, POSIX
isn't broken here, and even if it was, you have to remain compatible.

> This scheme makes for very little change to existing tools,

... while breaking fundamental assumptions by all programs in a major way,
and no sane solution for legacy applications in sight, with unknown
(probably huge) correctness and security implications...

> users may then do a "gimp somefile/icon.jpg"  for example.
> Or "ls somefile/*" to see all the named streams/forks.

Please don't rehash this one. It is fundamentally broken.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513
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