Re: I discussed reading directories as files with jra, Stallman,

Alexander Viro (viro@math.psu.edu)
Sun, 20 Jun 1999 14:56:34 -0400 (EDT)


On 20 Jun 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> I don't think that is true. I think the directory and the file should be
> considered separate, it's just that "lookup()" can find one or the other
> depending on use..

lookup()? It will confuse the living hell of dcache lookups, for one.

> So I think it should be considered a _naming_ issue, and not much else.

Elaborate, please. What is the parent dentry of file that happens to have
the same name as a directory? What happens upon rename() over (or from)
it? I'm not asking about the implementation - just about the semantics you
want for those objects. What do you want to see if it is NFS-exported?
What do you want to have upon d_path() of such animal?

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