Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:44:06 -0700 | From | "Martin J. Bligh" <> | Subject | Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 |
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--On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:15:19 -0700 Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote: > On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Rik van Riel wrote: >> >> It's a relief to know that nobody's taking my humorous >> suggestion seriously, but now we still have the "standard >> Unix tools can't manipulate files" problem... > > I disagree. They can manipulate the files a whole lot better than they can > manipulate xattr's. > > For example, you _could_ probably (but hey, maybe "tar" tries to strip > slashes off the end of filenames, so this might not work due to silly > reasons like that) back up a compound file with > > tar cvf file.tar file file/ > > although unpacking it would require that tar be taught about the thing. > And you definitely could write a script to do the thing, ie even with an > unmodified tar you could do > > tar cvf file-archive.tar file > cd file > tar cvf ../attribute-archive.tar . > > which is a hell of a lot better than what you can do with the fsattr > interfaces and unmodified legacy applications. > > So one of the advantages of "dir-as-file/file-as-dir" is exactly that you > _can_ manipulate the data with legacy tools. Sure, things that traverse a > directory tree might need some (likely fairly trivial) modifications if > they really want to take advantage of the subfiles, but that's still > likely to be _much_ less of an issue than with fsattr's that have a > totally different model entirely.
What would "test -d" and "test -f" return on these magic beasties? I can't think of any combinations that wouldn't confuse the crap out of userspace.
M.
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