Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[Martin J. Bligh]

--On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:15:19 -0700 Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

What would "test -d" and "test -f" return on these magic beasties? I can't
think of any combinations that wouldn't confuse the crap out of userspace.

M.

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