On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, David Masover wrote:Whoa! No it won't. It will allow you to create a metafile named type if you choose. Or maybe a metadirectory named types, I don't really care much about this stuff yet, we need to do other things to the semantics more urgently than this, Typing requires a lot of cooperation from user space apps. I don't really expect to have that much social pull on the issue, but if someone chooses to design their app to use a types metadirectory, I don't mind accomodating on it. I apologize if from my saying that I gave the impression that I think files should be strongly typed.
reiser4 kernel will contain knowledge of fs type contained in a file.
In every implementation so far it has been a net disaster, because OS designers who type things have been willing to make users pay attention to type when they don't want to. Sometimes trying to make too much out of something makes it a mistake when being a bit more laid back would make it ok. Me, I am so laid back, I prefer to work on other features for a few years first.....;-)
That's a disaster, btw.
There is no one "fs type" of a file. Files have at _least_ one type
(bytestream), but most have more. Which is why automatically doing the
right thing (in the sense you seem to want) in kernel space is simply not
possible.
Linus