> On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Hans Reiser wrote:
>
> >
> > When you cat mydoc.doc, it should come out with delimiters separating
> > the files according to some arbitrary syntax, that way it can all work.
>
> Hrrrmmmm... No offence, but... where did it come from? Some demented
> LISPer? You *do* realize that such suggestion implies quoting scheme,
> right?
Block quotes can contain a count. When you cat mydoc.doc, you could get
something like a header of attributes per file, where one of the
attributes is the length of the file's data (e.g. like the HTTP header
Content-Length). I like HTTP more than e.g. the tar format, since it
contains attribute: value pairs, and that would allow to make better use
of a database-like structured filesystem, where extended attributes are
possible. The only disadvantage is that HTTP has implicit types of
attributes (making them explicit, e.g. "int64 Content-Length: 1234")
would help generic parsing a lot. The file should be self-containing,
and not refer to external definitions of what type the value actually
is.
BTW: when you start thinking about a query_attributes(2) call, make sure
not to repeat the XInternAtom flaw: attributes are labeled by strings
(that's a good idea), but the string isn't used for each command:
instead, the application assigns a unique number to each attribute name,
and sends that pair to the filesystem. It subsequently uses it's own
numbers to name the attributes.
-- Bernd Paysan
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