Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 8 Aug 1997 09:49:33 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: Msdos name alias patch for 2.1.48 |
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On Fri, 8 Aug 1997, Janos Farkas wrote: > > But if the lookup could respect an > kludgy, (and only usable by win/dosemu) bit like O_NOCASE, what's so > wrong with the fs internal lookup() checking for/creating alias dentries? > And that's what Andreas proposed, and fits the "requirements" much better. > It's probably the only way to retain the correct referenced name in > dentries for all types of aliases (hard links, and case independence --- > affs has both).
Alias dentries that do not correspond to actual physical aliases (ie hard links) are _very_ nasty to handle.
Creating them is easy (that's what the trivial msdosfs patch does).
Deleting them is non-trivial. Re-naming a file that has aliases is worse.
Right now the dcache has _very_ nice semantics for rename/delete (you can still follow the dentry tree back to the root, so you get a nice pathname for the dentry - and one which stays correct even when you rename the file).
Introducing virtual aliases would break that behaviour (or at least it would be really horrible to try to support the behaviour correctly).
Linus
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