lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2004]   [Aug]   [25]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
    /
    Date
    From
    SubjectRe: silent semantic changes with reiser4


    On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
    >
    > For one thing _I_ didn't decide about xattrs anyway. And I still
    > haven't seen a design from you on -fsdevel how you try to solve the
    > problems with files as directories.

    Hey, files-as-directories are one of my pet things, so I have to side with
    Hans on this one. I think it just makes sense. A hell of a lot more sense
    than xattrs, anyway, since it allows scripts etc standard tools to touch
    the attributes.

    It's the UNIX way.

    And yes, the semantics can _easily_ be solved in very unixy ways.

    One way to solve it is to just realize that a final slash at the end
    implies pretty strongly that you want to treat it as a directory. So what
    you do is:

    - without the slash, a file-as-dir won't open with O_DIRECTORY (ENOTDIR)
    - with the slash, it won't open _without_ O_DIRECTORY (EISDIR)

    Problem solved. Very user-friendly, and very intuitive.

    Will it potentially break something? Sure. Do we care? Me, I'll take that
    kind of extension _any_ day over xattrs, that are fundamentally flawed in
    my opinion and totally useless. The argument that applications like "tar"
    won't understand the file-as-directory thing is _flawed_, since legacy
    apps won't understand xattrs either.

    Oh, add a O_NOXATTRS flag to force a path lookup to only use regular
    directories, the same way we have O_NOFOLLOW and friends. That allows
    people to see the difference, if they care (ie a file server might decide
    that it doesn't want to expose things like this).

    I never liked the xattr stuff. It makes little sense, and is totally
    useless for 99.9999% of everything. I still don't see the point of it,
    except for samba. Ugly.

    Linus
    -
    To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
    the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
    More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
    Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

    \
     
     \ /
      Last update: 2009-11-18 23:46    [W:5.897 / U:0.128 seconds]
    ©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site