Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives

[James Bruce]

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> ...
> But _my_ point is, no user program is going to take _advantage_ of
> anything that only one filesystem on one system offers.
>
> So there's no point.
>
> It's much saner (from _any_ app standpoint) to roll their own database in 
> user space - that way it just works.
>
> In other words, nobody is really ever going to take advantage of this. 
> This is _not_ how technical advanncement happens. The way you get people 
> to take advantage of something is to have a nice gradual ramp-up, not a 
> sudden new feature that they can't realistically use.
> ...

Sure, but there are plenty of existing interfaces that you could 
emulate.  One could make a small library to use a transactional 
filesystem to implement the Berkely DB interface (libdb) for example.  
So on filesystems without such support your app could use the regular 
userspace database, but on a transactional filesystem it'd just use 
regular files, which would simplify database management and likely 
increase performance over the userspace-only version (libdb is pretty 
slow).  In terms of functionality it'd just be a drop-in replacement, 
just like math libraries that use MMX/SSE when available.

   - Jim Bruce

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