Re: (reiserfs) Re: File systems are semantically impoverished compared

Alexander Viro (viro@math.psu.edu)
Sat, 26 Jun 1999 17:51:09 -0400 (EDT)


On Sat, 26 Jun 1999, Hans Reiser wrote:

>
> The goal of reiserfs is not to get every person, who has invented yet
> another namespace that can share the interactions it conducts with no
> other namespace, to convert to reiserfs. The goal of reiserfs is to one
> by one eliminate the reasons why these new namespaces keep getting
> invented rather than using the filesystem namespace. I cannot
> unify the namespaces, I can only somewhat reduce the reasons why they
> fragment, and pontificate a bit at those who fragment them.
>
> Two filesystem layers are indeed terrible. What you are doing is not
> analogous to, say, putting a file system ontop of a disk driver which is
> ontop of a piece of hardware, no, you are writing a C interpreter in
> Pascal. You are putting a motorcycle seat ontop of a truck chassis, and
> then you are asking me to define why a truck chassis isn't as functional
> as a motorcycle chassis, and given that you have already built a truck
> chassis, you ask why it is that I think you won't have all the
> functionality of a motorcycle using your motorcycle seat and handlebars
> ontop of a truck chassis. What you want to do is like telling the TCP/IP
> guys when they wrote TCP/IP that they should be using the serial line
> driver as the bottom layer of their TCP/IP implementation, putting the
> TCP/IP stuff in user space, and then preaching about the benefits of
> increased portability to other Unixes that would result from that.

Very colourful. What about a couple of technical arguments instead of
Datamation-level analogies?

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