Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

From: Hans Reiser
Date: Sun Aug 29 2004 - 04:42:57 EST


Linus Torvalds wrote:

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:


I object to openat().....



Sound slike you object to O_XATTRS, not openat() itself.

Realize that openat() works independently of any special streams, it's
fundamentally a "look up name starting from this file" (rather than
"starting from root" or "starting from cwd").

Linus




well, isn't that namespace fragmentation by definition? If you can't go

cat filenameA/metas/permissions > filenameB/metas/permissions

find / -exec cat {}/permissions \; | grep 4777 | wc -l

then aren't you missing the whole point of this exercise which is to allow the whole OS to be better integrated into a more unified namespace so that data can leap from one tool to another, and one container to another, with the greatest of ease? If cat cannot access the metadata without changing the code of cat, then all the elegance goes poof.

It completely baffles me what disabling filenameA/.. does for us. Why add asymmetries? Ease of implementation is no excuse for such asymmetry.

Tomorrow I am going to send a little essay I wrote this evening on these metafiles.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/