Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[Stephen Wille Padnos]

Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>  
>
> > So "/tmp/bash" is _not_ two different things. It is _one_ entity, that
> > contains both a standard data stream (the "file" part) _and_ pointers to
> > other named streams (the "directory" part).
> >    
> Thinking about it some more, how would file managers and
> file chosers handle this situation ?
>
> Currently the user browses the directory tree and when
> the user clicks on something, one of the following 
> happens:
>
> 1) if it is a directory, the file manager/choser changes
>   into that directory
>  
How does the file manager / chooser decide whether you're trying to move 
into a directory, or the meta-data-directory for a directory?
It's not just files that should have metadata - directories need* them 
too.  Making it possible to see attributes as a directory under a file 
is great, but you'd still need an O_META flag for accessing directory 
metadata (since there are already files under a directory).

> 2) if it is a file, the file is opened
>
> Now how do we present things to users ?
>
> How will users know when an object can only be chdired
> into, or only be opened ?
>
> For objects that do both, how does the user choose ?
>
> Do we really want to have a file paradigm that's different
> from the other OSes out there ?
>  
MacOS does, Be did (sort of).  I'm not sure it would be the end of the 
world, as long as the data can be extracted.

> What happens when users want to transfer data from Linux
> to another system ?
>  
That would depend on the other system.  Data is easy, metadata is hard.
It would be possible to create an XML schema for metadata, and if 
requested (O_EVERYTHING?), the file data is returned with all metadata 
in XML tags.  (not advocating this, just an idea :)
- Steve

* I say need in the same way as one *needs* to upgrade their 2GHz 
computer - it would be nice :)

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