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    SubjectRe: silent semantic changes with reiser4
    Rik van Riel wrote:

    >On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
    >
    >
    >>So "/tmp/bash" is _not_ two different things. It is _one_ entity, that
    >>contains both a standard data stream (the "file" part) _and_ pointers to
    >>other named streams (the "directory" part).
    >>
    >>
    >Thinking about it some more, how would file managers and
    >file chosers handle this situation ?
    >
    >Currently the user browses the directory tree and when
    >the user clicks on something, one of the following
    >happens:
    >
    >1) if it is a directory, the file manager/choser changes
    > into that directory
    >
    >
    How does the file manager / chooser decide whether you're trying to move
    into a directory, or the meta-data-directory for a directory?
    It's not just files that should have metadata - directories need* them
    too. Making it possible to see attributes as a directory under a file
    is great, but you'd still need an O_META flag for accessing directory
    metadata (since there are already files under a directory).

    >2) if it is a file, the file is opened
    >
    >Now how do we present things to users ?
    >
    >How will users know when an object can only be chdired
    >into, or only be opened ?
    >
    >For objects that do both, how does the user choose ?
    >
    >Do we really want to have a file paradigm that's different
    >from the other OSes out there ?
    >
    >
    MacOS does, Be did (sort of). I'm not sure it would be the end of the
    world, as long as the data can be extracted.

    >What happens when users want to transfer data from Linux
    >to another system ?
    >
    >
    That would depend on the other system. Data is easy, metadata is hard.
    It would be possible to create an XML schema for metadata, and if
    requested (O_EVERYTHING?), the file data is returned with all metadata
    in XML tags. (not advocating this, just an idea :)
    - Steve

    * I say need in the same way as one *needs* to upgrade their 2GHz
    computer - it would be nice :)

    -
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