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SubjectRe: I discussed reading directories as files with jra, Stallman, and loic


On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> Good. The only question being: why are we pushing the traditional symlinks
> under the same roof? That's what makes me very uncomfortable. And it makes
> lookup_dentry() pretty uncomfortable too - we got *way* too nasty
> recursion there.

I much prefer recursion. Recursion is cheap and simple, and optimizes the
right case. And we can (and do) easily limit it, so there is no real stack
space issue, espcially as the lookup is pretty frugal when it comes to
stack space anyway).

A lot of people think recursion is "nasty" - while in fact it's a very
elegant way to do something that would otherwise be much uglier. So I
think it's only right and proper to have symlinks be just another kind of
wormhole. No special cases.

Linus


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