Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:35:37 -0400 | From | Stephen Wille Padnos <> | Subject | Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 |
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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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