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    SubjectRe: silent semantic changes with reiser4
    --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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