Messages in this thread |  | | | From | Segher Boessenkool <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Open Firmware device tree virtual filesystem | | Date | Tue, 2 Jan 2007 00:52:36 +0100 |
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>> If you *really* want (the option of) showing things as text >> in the filesystem, you better make it so that there is a >> one-to-one translation back to binary. For example, what >> does this mean, is it a text string or two bytes: >> >> 01.02 >> >> Yes you as a user can guess, but scripts can't (reliably). > > We have some extensive code in fs/openpromfs/inode.c that > determines whether a property is text or not. I can't > guarentee it works %100, but it's very context dependant > (only the driver "knows") but it works for all the cases > I've tried.
It's still a heuristic, I don't think the kernel should be doing things like this; leave the guesswork to userland, where different users can guess in different ways if they want/need.
Some real life properties contain _both_ a binary part and a text part, btw.
> I really think you're making a mountain out of a mole hill, to be > honest :-)
Heh. There is one big problem: text representation is useless (to scripts etc.) unless it can be transformed back to binary; i.e., it has to be possible to reliably detect _how_ some property is represented into text, something that cannot be done with how openpromfs handles it.
Segher
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