Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Note that some NTFS people have advocated the NTFS design: special
> functions for setting and accessing the NTFS EA's. And that is _equally_
> short-sighted. It misses the point entirely: I'm not interested in a
> HFS-specific hack, and I'm not interested in a NTFS-specific hack.
While I'm not neccissarily an "NTFS person," I feel
compelled to point out that NTFS named streams operate
as normal files, and are accessed via a namespace
extension, the ":" character. BeFS, HPFS, etc. Extended
Attributes can be built on top of NTFS-style Named
Streams by providing accessor functions that simply
opening a stream, writing a chunk of data to it, and
closing it again. NTFS is the only FS, AFAIK, that
supports such a generic view of streams. BeFS, the Mac,
etc. all use Extended Attributes available as name-value
pairs only via special functions.
I am also not interested in a filesystem-specific hack.
It just seems that the NTFS method of making streams
usable by open(), read(), write(), seek(), etc. makes
sense as a foundation for all types of EAs. You could
even mmap() streams for the benefit of the accessor
functions.
-Michael
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 15 2000 - 21:00:30 EST