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    SubjectRe: silent semantic changes with reiser4
    Linus Torvalds wrote:

    >On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
    >
    >
    >>For one thing _I_ didn't decide about xattrs anyway. And I still
    >>haven't seen a design from you on -fsdevel how you try to solve the
    >>problems with files as directories.
    >>
    >>
    >
    >Hey, files-as-directories are one of my pet things, so I have to side with
    >Hans on this one. I think it just makes sense. A hell of a lot more sense
    >than xattrs, anyway, since it allows scripts etc standard tools to touch
    >the attributes.
    >
    >It's the UNIX way.
    >
    >And yes, the semantics can _easily_ be solved in very unixy ways.
    >
    >One way to solve it is to just realize that a final slash at the end
    >implies pretty strongly that you want to treat it as a directory. So what
    >you do is:
    >
    > - without the slash, a file-as-dir won't open with O_DIRECTORY (ENOTDIR)
    > - with the slash, it won't open _without_ O_DIRECTORY (EISDIR)
    >
    >Problem solved. Very user-friendly, and very intuitive.
    >
    >Will it potentially break something? Sure. Do we care? Me, I'll take that
    >kind of extension _any_ day over xattrs, that are fundamentally flawed in
    >my opinion and totally useless. The argument that applications like "tar"
    >won't understand the file-as-directory thing is _flawed_, since legacy
    >apps won't understand xattrs either.
    >
    >Oh, add a O_NOXATTRS flag to force a path lookup to only use regular
    >directories, the same way we have O_NOFOLLOW and friends. That allows
    >people to see the difference, if they care (ie a file server might decide
    >that it doesn't want to expose things like this).
    >
    >
    I think we should require people to care enough to supply an O_NOMETAS
    flag to see the difference.

    >I never liked the xattr stuff. It makes little sense, and is totally
    >useless for 99.9999% of everything. I still don't see the point of it,
    >except for samba. Ugly.
    >
    > Linus
    >
    >
    >
    >

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