Salut,

On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 08:39:25PM -0400, Alexander G. M. Smith wrote:
> I mostly  agree, like I was  saying earlier, file  types are needed!
> The kernel  doesn't have  to know  about all of  them, just  some of
> them.  It should be possible to  attach a file type to everything so
> you  know what  kind of  thing it  is, not  just block  or character
> device or file, but something like a MIME type.

Then store the value computed  by libmagic into an extended attribute,
if you  like. I still  don't see why  the kernel should even  care. It
shouldn't read things from files anyway, as a kernel shall be bootable
on a busybox  system (and *Step) as  well, so we don't rely  on the fs
layout in any way.

> Optionally the  kernel could  also maintain the  global list  of all
> file types  and their  properties (such as  which ones  are indexed,
> which are computed),  though that could also be  done in userland if
> you  aren't doing  indexing or  computed attributes  or  other fancy
> operations.

Quel horreur!

Do it in userland, really.

If I  get the time,  I'll write you  a small daemon based  on libmagic
which  stores  the  file  attributes  in xattrs,  or  if  they're  not
supported, in some MacOS/Xish per-directory files. Even a file manager
("finder") can do that, there's not even the need for a daemon.

				Tonnerre