From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Chris Dawes Subject: Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to document the idea of what reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:49:28 +0100 Message-ID: <1093981768.18249.4.camel@dobbin.local.net> References: <41323AD8.7040103@namesys.com> <200408312055.56335.v13@priest.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: <200408312055.56335.v13@priest.com> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: V13 Cc: Hans Reiser , Andrew Morton , Linux Kernel , Linus Torvalds , reiserfs-list@namesys.com 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) > > <>