Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to document the idea of what reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why

[Chris Dawes <cmsd2@octomonkey.org.uk>]

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 18:55, V13 wrote:
...
>   AFAIK and AFAICS the metadata are not files or directories. You can look at 
> them as files/dirs but they are not, just like a tar is not a directory. I 
> believe that the correct thing to do (tm) is to add a new 'concept' named 
> 'metadata' (which already exists). This way you'll have files, directories 
> and metadata (or whatever you call them). So, each directory can have 
> metadatas and files and each file can have metadatas. Then you have to 
> provide some new methods of accessing them and not to use chdir() etc. (lets 
> say chdir_meta() to enter the meta dir which will work for files too). After 
> entering the 'metadir' you'll be able to use existing methods etc to access 
> its 'files'.

I think this is what Hans is trying to avoid -- it results in creating a
separate namespace for the metadata.

I would agree with the notion that metadata nodes are light-weight files
in that they themselves have no metadata associated with them, but I
don't see why they need separate system-calls (if we can help it).

Chris Dawes.


> 
>   This approach doesn't mess with existing things and can be extended for 
> other filesystems too.
> 
> (Just a thought)
> 
> <<V13>>