Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 6 Jul 1999 20:43:46 +0100 | From | Roger Gammans <> | Subject | Re: [RFC] File flags handling - proposal for API. |
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In article <19990705203055.A6029@pcep-jamie.cern.ch>, Jamie Lokier <lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk> writes >Open mailer. "Attach File" blahblah.doc. "Attachment error: Is a >directory". (Switching mailers isn't an option: too many critical >features in use daily). > Hmm, P'hap -EISDIR could be caught in an application (libc wrapper?) library. Check if "blahblah.doc/.this-dir-is-an-albod" exists and if so then open a pipe to the output of tar -xz instead.
The only catch I can see is that some people what this to handle a `default representation' instead, presumably so they can grep it or whatever, with the existing tools. To be honest people who are likely[1] to want to do that are likely to know enough to look inside the directory and deal with it like that.
Of course this won't satisfy those who don't like the existing semantics to be broken[2], but they can either not use albod-aware wrappers and avoid them. (which they will do anyway - I'm assuming here this group in congruent with the don't want/need albods group). Or just not use these tools on albod directories.
A second problem is undocumented directory (read: file) formats - but we don't have any of those do we?
TTFN
[1] I use the word likely here as I'm sure someone has an exception to raise. [2] Like directories silently turning into pipes. Put like that it sounds horrible doesn't it.[3] [3] Eek. My vote has to be to keep it in user-space. I was thinking of proposing the FS gives the lib writers 1 bit or so per inode as a flag for this sort of thing but it's broken over NFS and the above mechanism doesn't need it..[4] [4] Do doubt so one will find something wrong with it.[4]
(like a stack overflow)
-- Roger Gammans "If I have trouble installing Linux, something is wrong. Very wrong." -- Linus Torvalds
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