Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:48:10 -0700 | From | Hans Reiser <> | Subject | Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 |
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Wichert Akkerman wrote:
>Previously Spam wrote: > > >> Because having user space tools and code will make it not work with >> everything. Keeping stuff in the kernel should make the new features >> transparent to the applications. >> >> > >But having it in the kernel has the same problem. If you read the >Solaris documentation you will see that a bunch of utilties had to >get a new commandline option to be able to access the metadata and >a special utility was added for other applications. > They did it wrong.
> If you look >at windows you will see that you need to use a filename like ><realfilename>:<streamname>:$DATA (which obviously does not work for >single-character filenames). > > again, they did it wrong. See Rob Pike's "The Hideous Name" for why that is wrong.
>Ignoring samba for a bit which just needs streams to stay compatible >with windows I see few reasons for using streams: > >* files are more complex these days and tend to include multiple > different things: images with thumbnails and exif data, 'office' > documents containing both text and images > >* standard way to add common metadata to a file which can be used for > searching tools (author, copyright, keywords, etc.) > >But both can already be done in userland (modern image formats can store >thumbnails and exif data internally, applications use tar or zip-like >files for documents, etc.). The metadata part is a lot more complicated >as well since the behaviour of attributes might need to be complex: >if I change an image using an application that is not stream-aware, what >should happen to its thumbnail? > >The only common benefits I can see are standardisation and optimization: >instead of every file format or application defining a way to specify >metadata for a file you get a common API defined by the OS (but you'll >still need to standardize on attribute names and formats, so plenty of >room that will still not help), and instead of parsing different files >or XML streams you can directly access a bit of metadata. > >So far I'm not convinced that streams are worth the effort. Not that my >opinion is all that relevant here, but still :) > >Wichert. > > >
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