Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:15:19 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 |
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On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Rik van Riel wrote: > > It's a relief to know that nobody's taking my humorous > suggestion seriously, but now we still have the "standard > Unix tools can't manipulate files" problem...
I disagree. They can manipulate the files a whole lot better than they can manipulate xattr's.
For example, you _could_ probably (but hey, maybe "tar" tries to strip slashes off the end of filenames, so this might not work due to silly reasons like that) back up a compound file with
tar cvf file.tar file file/
although unpacking it would require that tar be taught about the thing. And you definitely could write a script to do the thing, ie even with an unmodified tar you could do
tar cvf file-archive.tar file cd file tar cvf ../attribute-archive.tar .
which is a hell of a lot better than what you can do with the fsattr interfaces and unmodified legacy applications.
So one of the advantages of "dir-as-file/file-as-dir" is exactly that you _can_ manipulate the data with legacy tools. Sure, things that traverse a directory tree might need some (likely fairly trivial) modifications if they really want to take advantage of the subfiles, but that's still likely to be _much_ less of an issue than with fsattr's that have a totally different model entirely.
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