Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[Hans Reiser]

Timothy Miller wrote:

> Hans Reiser wrote:
>
> > Peter Foldiak wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 06:22, Hans Reiser wrote:
> > >  
> > >
> > > > He asked me, why not just access a filename's size as filename/size?
> > > >   
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > I now understand that you need a way to distinguish between something
> > > like
> > >
> > > shoe/size
> > >
> > > and
> > >
> > > shoe/.../size   (or shoe/..size)
> > >
> > > The first one is the size of the shoe, the second is the automatically
> > > generated size of the file (object). You would get into trouble if you
> > > would not allow the user to use shoe/size for shoe size. Peter
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >  
> > exactly.
> >
> > Of course, problem/shoe/size could refer to shoe size in centimeters 
> > of a problem shoe or the size of the problem relating to a shoe in 
> > units of reporters providing press coverage of it or....
> >
> > So there are lots of opportunities for ambiguity in semantics....
> >
> > Still, widely used builtins seem like they should be moderately 
> > evasive of commonly used names.
>
>
> You know, if tools all need to be rewritten anyway to deal with the 
> file metadata "directory", then why not change the symbol that 
> delimits the metadata key?

because it is useful that it is only a style convention.  Changing the 
symbol makes it mandatory to distinguish metafiles from files.

> Everyone likes ':', so we'd have "problem/shoe:size".  (Don't bother 
> to complain about files which have : in them, because I already know 
> it sucks, but it's an example.)
>
> See, unless you can come up with a way to seamlessly make old tools 
> work with the new semantics, then there's no reason not to make more 
> than one change to tools at at the same time.
>
> Also, if you take the ':' example literally, then the file system 
> would need to be able to figure out that a file whose literal name is 
> "C:\MYPR0NDIR\BODY_PARTS.JPG" isn't referring to metadata for a file 
> named "C".  :)

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