Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 20 Jun 1999 16:09:35 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: I discussed reading directories as files with jra, Stallman, and loic |
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On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, Alexander Viro wrote: > > What I see here is that lookup_dentry() will... Oh, my. Yes, it will work, > but... Arrgh. I'ld rather change the order of tests in lookup_dentry() and > avoid checking LOOKUP_CONTINUE in the method. By the way, your version > will *not* work for foo/dir/ - it will follow the link ;-)
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if small changes would be needed, but they really should be pretty much one-liners.
> Linus, I see your point here, but IMO it means only one thing - that we > should stop pretending that those objects are symlinks. They are > different. Yes, we have one more type of object. Call it VFS-link, > wormhole, whatever.
They are NOT symlinks. They never were. It so happens that the VFS _method_ is called "follow_link", but yes, you might as well call it "wormhole".
It so happens that for a traditional "unix" symlink, the "wormhole()" method implies reading the link and looking it up.
> I'm still curious - what are you going to do with rename()? Can the > "default" file be separated from its directory?
It depends on the filesystem. The "wormhole()" operation might be equivalent to following a link through a fixed name, but it could be something else altogether (it could result in another dentry, but with the same inode - a strange kind of magic hardlink).
That's a low-level FS issue, and should just be decided on implementation and usability concerns rather than anything else..
Linus
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