Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 23 Jun 1999 02:44:45 +0200 (CEST) | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Re: (reiserfs) Re: I discussed reading directories as files with jra, Stallman, and |
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On Tue, 22 Jun 1999, Bill Huey wrote:
> Are you telling me that you, being a Unix/Linux, person can't handle > FTPing a multistream file with all those user-unfriendly tar options ?
yes. Linux doesnt _want_ to deal with restrictive, application-specific complexity like 'resource forks'.
> Watch how "find" chokes on Linux/Unix/Win32 systems and then do the > same search on crappy MacOS machine that's got a 32 bit DOS extender for > a VM subsystem and blow the all the Linux/Unix/Win32 away from having all > those dorky "dot" ("." <---) pathetically slow down the search.
you havent tried this, have you? The new 2.2 kernel includes a rather fast file namespace cache implementation, it takes ~5 microseconds to look up a file. Too slow?
> You can just search the data fork for content.
why should we add such a restrictive construct to the kerenel, if we already have a mechanism that does this and more.
> File suffix MIME determination is just about the most brain-dead/annoying > thing. Replace them with per file attributes for MIME determination, etc...
no. resource forks are only useful in a very limited sense. We dont want resource forks for the same reason we do not want to put SQL parsers and Cobol compilers into the kernel. It's up to the application how it uses the file namespace - directories are a perfect (and more generic because recursive) construct to store multiple attributes.
Are MacOS resource forks recursive? No. Can MacOS resource forks be files? No. Can MacOS resource fork attributes have different permissions as the base file? No. Can MacOS attributes be symbolic linked across files to save space and be more generic? No. Can MacOS resource fork attributes be different things to different users in a multiuser environment? No. Directories are all 'Yes' to those questions, and they are extremely fast with 2.2. Whats your problem with directories?
-- mingo
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