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SubjectRe: Representation of structure in filesystems Was:Albods,reiserfs,trolls and an lot of other things


On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Morten S. Nielsen wrote:

> Summary: Damn! either I get a flat file and has to do everything myself or
> I get a shaky directory which may be meddeled with and has to be packed if
> I have to give it to a friend or colleague...
>
> I'm not a kernel hacker so I haven't a very good idea about how to
> implement a compound object or whether it ought to be done in userspace or
> kernelspace. It's the notion of why a compound object i usefull I want to
> comment...
>
> There is this underlying in unix (and i suppose most other OS's) that a
> file may hold only one type of data. This makes it easy to handle the file
> because the data type is homogenous throughout the file. The ordering
> within the file is "start to end".

Structured files had been done in many ancient systems. They are dead,
Jim. Learn our history - dropping that idiocy was one of the nicest
inventions in UNIX. Linux is not the first flavour of UNIX that attracted
programmers from alien systems. This horse is flogged to death back in
early 80s. Look into unix-wizards archives. Gives serious deja vu.

> [THE_STUPID_Q]
> Why is the header files split from both the library and the source/object
> file? It's obviously no good without at least one of them? When you work
> it is of course nice to have separated the header from the object and
> source file since there's a more to one relation, but when you have
> finished writing your lib?

Yes? I can compile without a library. Linking is another story,
indeed, but compile is quite fine, thank you very much. Header files are
not necessary definitions for anything - they can contain any text. And
having that ability is good.

> [OFFTOPIC PS.:]
> Just imagine writing the kernel in F77 :-)

Quite a few nice kernels were written in macroassembler. UNIX
switched to C (and it was good) in v4.

Sigh... How it was? Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned
to reinvent it. Poorly.


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