On Fri, 8 Aug 1997, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> ...
>
> I have one very basic rule when it comes to "good ideas". A good idea is
> not an idea that solves a problem cleanly. A good idea is an idea that
> solves SEVERAL things at the same time. The mark of good coding is not
> that the program does what you want, it's that it _also_ does something
> that you didn't start out wanting.
Here are some more places where I think a generalization of handling
different namespaces would be a win:
- Dosemu redirecting e.g. an ext2 drive as a Dos-drive
- Wine redirecting e.g. an ext2 drive as a Dos-drive
- Mars_NWE exporting e.g. an ext2 drive to Dos Clients
- probably Samba too
The problem is, that on a sensible Filesystem like Ext2, e.g "Makefile",
"makefile" and "Makefile" are all separate Files, while for Dos they aren't.
So for Dos-Clients they should be referenced like "makefi~1", "makefi~2" and
"makefi~3" or in a scheme like this.
Each of this programs above does it's own mapping in user space, resulting
in different behaviours and probably race conditions when something on the
filessytem changes between doing the mapping and doing an action with the
mapped file. And more, Mars_NWE for example warns that activating that mapping
will result in a slowdown.
What about support for Namespaces in the Kernel?
Bye
-- Uwe Bonnes bon@elektron.ikp.physik.th-darmstadt.deFree Software: Contribute nothing, expect nothing
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