Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[Felipe Alfaro Solana]

On Thursday 26 August 2004 15:59, Spam wrote:

>   Backup to me is a special case, not simply a copy of files, but also
>   retaining all the extra data, info, attributes, etc, that comes with
>   the file.
>
>   Enabling  support  to  have  all  of  this  extra  stuff  below  the
>   application  level  it  will  be  possible to retain everything even
>   though applications do not support them.
>
>   Backup tools, however, must know about these new features to be able
>   to  backup  them.  And so will every tool that directly accesses the
>   filesystem instead of using the OS API for it.

Thus, this kind of metadata API must be made accessible through the VFS layer, 
if we want to make it FS-independent (not tied to Reiser4). If the real FS 
does not support metadata operations, just ignore them (much like in ISO9660 
ignoring write operations).

>   And  from  I  learned  in an earlier message, tools like cp actually
>   work  on  the  fs level and themselves move the data to the new file
>   instead   of  letting  the OS handle it. This seem to me as it could
>   be  dangerous and could also prevent any kind of enhancements to the
>   FS unless every tool like cp is patched.

I still don't understand why a copy_file() syscall is still missing.
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