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SubjectRe: Implementing Meta File information in Linux

Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com)
> On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

>> That is the crux of my objections. If we add such hidden information,
>> then all our current tools (NFS, tar, cp, mv etc) fail. NFS in
>> particular is a killer: by adding functionality to the fs which cannot
>> be encoded in the standard NFS protocol, we lose the ability to share
>> these files.
>
> This seems to decide the issue right here: any solution based on ReiserFS,
> or an expanded ext2fs, would be intrinsically unportable. Such techniques
> could be used, but only as a Linux-local optimization. Otherwise, we kill
> portability and transportability, which contradicts the entire point of
> the game.

Then we must forget about ACLs, privs, the immutable bit...
We should be using 14-character unix filenames too. No, make
that 8.3 case-insensitive filenames. We must be portable!

I think not. New features have to start somewhere, and they spread
to other filesystems as time passes. We already need a forked
file API for ntfs, hfs, and smbfs.

All our current tools (NFS, tar, cp, mv etc) fail already. They don't
handle all the ext2 flags. They certainly don't handle Coda or FAT.
What else is new? Userspace was, is, and will be broken.

Solutions:

Windows has a FileCopyEx call that could be stolen. It deals with
all the extra data, including both security attributes and strange
forks. It can avoid network traffic when the server supports the call.

Windows has a backup API that handles all the details. Microsoft could
add weird new features to the filesystem without breaking backup tools.
The backup API requires special privilege and lets the backup admin
avoid disturbing _any_ of the time stamps.

We need these anyway, to allow sane handling of foreign filesystems
and to let us add B*-level security features to the filesystem.


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