Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 3 Sep 2004 09:55:39 -0400 | From | "John Stoffel" <> | Subject | Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives |
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>>>>> "David" == David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com> writes:
David> File-as-a-dir has numerous advantages, but enough have been David> discussed. Short list is image mounts, tarballs, streams, David> metas, and namespace unification. Longer list and explanations David> can be found if you RTFA.
And it has numerous dis-advantages as well, since it doesn't have a good set of semantics and syntax defined yet, nor does it explain except by vigorous handwaving the performance and security impacts it can have.
My personal feeling is that the mount(8) command should be the tool used to extract and expose the internal namespace of files like this and to then graft it onto the standard Unix namespace with gross Unix semantics, but it's own wacky internal semantics. This way, standard tools don't care, but special tools which know how to handle it can do what they want.
> mount -t tarfs /some/place/on/disk/foo.tar.gz /mnt/tar > cp /var/tmp/img.gif . > umount /mnt/tar
Oops! Someone did a rm /some/place/on/disk/foo.tar.gz between steps one and two. Now what happens? Please define those semantics...
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