Re: [PATCH 00/13] cross rename v4

[David Howells]

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> So what do others that support this do?  Looking at the gitweb for
> ls.c in coreutils, we find:
> 
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=src/ls.c
> 
>     # ifdef DT_WHT
>                     case DT_WHT:  type = whiteout;          break;
>     # endif
> 
> so that's presumably what we should use.

Whilst that does seem reasonable, what about all the other software that
iterates over a directory?  Some of that is surely not going to know about
DT_WHT.

Further, while that may sort whiteouts, what about fallthroughs?  There isn't
a DT_ symbol for that...  Fallthroughs are 'really there' in the sense that
they're positive, but they should take on the underlying object type - which
in this situation we can't retrieve:-/

I wonder if it would be possible to require filesystems that can store
fallthroughs to store the lower type in the upper dentry (ie. there is no
fallthrough type per se, but rather fallthrough-to-file, f-to-char, f-to-sym,
etc.).

David
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/