Re: V4 status

[David Masover <jedi@ninja.dynup.net>]

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Fredrik Tolf wrote:

>May I ask what the current stability status is for V4? Is there mayhap
>a HTTP resource for it that I have not found?
>
>Fredrik Tolf
>
>  
>

I believe patching your kernel will not hurt anything else, and mounting 
a filesystem will probably not hurt anything else.

I have a laptop on which I use Reiser4 for everything but /boot (as v4 
is not supported by grub and v3 was never supported very well).  It 
seems reasonably stable (once I fixed a problem with xscreensaver).  
However, I still back up daily, and will continue to do so until someone 
here tells me I can trust it.  (Then I'll fall back to no backup until I 
get the tape drive working so I can do proper incremental backups.)

BTW, to all -- I have had no problems specifically reiser4 related.  I 
was complaining of crashes earlier, but it seems those were either in my 
pam libs or my screensaver -- reinstalling all my software seemed to 
help (and as I didn't touch the kernel, it wouldn't have fixed it if it 
were a filesystem issue).  In fact, I know for sure it's at least partly 
due to problems with pam and related things, because my su (among other 
things) had lost its setuid bit -- due to my using the wrong arguments 
to cp when upgrading from v3.

The only thing I might complain about is that, although it was listed as 
a possibility to display file permissions as files within a file (for 
example, I should be able to do 'touch file; ls file'), I have had two 
problems there.  First, ls seems to know it's a file, and so I can't see 
any files within it.  Second, it needs the executable bit, or I get 
permission denied errors when trying to look at any files inside it.  
Third, even with ls not working, no guesses I've made on potential 
filenames has worked.

I know almost nothing about the interface behind this.  That said, 
here's what I'd suggest (without knowing any better):
- - If I look at something without using a trailing slash, it should be 
treated as a file, except maybe for compatibility reasons.
- - If I do use a trailing slash, or as a parent directory to anything, it 
should be treated as a directory.
- - If it is a regular file (and not a directory pretending to be a file 
through some odd plugin -- /etc/passwd could be a file constructed from 
files in /etc/passwd/) then permission to view it as a directory should 
be assumed for anyone with read access.  As an alternative, the ability 
to change into a directory could be implemented as another security 
attribute, which is automatically linked to executable permission for 
"normal" directories.
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