Re: EACCESS vs ENOENT for nonexistent files-within-files

[Joe Orton <jorton@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 08:13:26PM +0400, Alex Zarochentsev wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 03:06:37PM +0100, Joe Orton wrote:
> > Hi, we had a bug report that Apache httpd logs a spurious error for
> > every file served from a reiser4 filesystem, because httpd assumes that
> > /path/to/file/.htaccess (where /path/to/file is a normal file) returns
> > ENOENT or ENOTDIR, but reiser4 returns EACCES in this case.
> > 
> > Can someone explain the justification behind reiser4's behaviour? 
> > httpd's assumption does not seem unreasonable, and EACCES seems to make
> > little sense for this error case.
> 
> It is because open(name, O_DIRECTORY) is successful for regular files in
> reiser4.  Once it succedes, Apache2 thinks that is a directory and tries to
> open .htaccess under it.

I don't think that has anything to do with it.  It's a simple open()
without O_DIRECTORY which is failing with EACCES.  The reporter
confirmed this with the simplest of tests:

$ touch newfile.txt
$ cat newfile.txt/.htaccess
cat: newfile.txt/.htaccess: Permission denied

this is the behaviour I'm trying to find the justification for.

> There are two solutions:
> 
> 1) mount reiser4 partition with "nopseudo" mount option.  it makes /metas/* files
> unaccessible.

If this is broken by default, our users will continue to complain, so 
that doesn't really help.

> 2) apply the patch:

OK, does this mean you do consider this a bug in reiser4 which will be
fixed in future releases, then?

Regards,

joe