Re: Interview with Hans on KernelTrap

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Peter Foldiak wrote:

> Hans, in the interview you give the example:
>
>  cat /home/reiser/mp3s/..../childcat > /dev/dsp
>
> to illustrate concatenation.
>
> I sorry for repeating myself, but still think it would be a lot cooler
> to be able to simply do:
>
>  cat /home/reiser/mp3s > /dev/dsp
>
> to achieve the same effect.

True.

> (We had a discussion of this (as part of the huge "file as directory"
> thread on the lists)
> http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0411.3/0044.html
> http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0505.1/0365.html
> and you seemed to agree then
> http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0505.1/0423.html
> )
> The convention (I think also approved(suggested?) by Linus at some
> point) could be that where you say
>
>  /home/reiser/mp3s
>
> you get a the file (or concatenation, if the directory has no "file"
> content itself), but when you say
>
>  /home/reiser/mp3s/
>
> (with the trailing "/"), you get the directory.
>
> So
>  book/chapter3/paragraph2
> is the second paragraph of the third chapter
> (or even better, a la XPath:
>  book/chapter[3]/paragraph[2]
> )
>
>  book/chapter3
> is the chapter
>
>  book
> is the whole book.
>
> The user (or tools) don't even have to know which is the "real" file,
> which are "parts of real files" and which are "concatenations of real
> files". This is really good for namespace unification across
> part-whole hierarchies. If you are required to use /..../ in the
> middle, it breaks this I think. Could we get rid of requiring "...."
> in the middle? (Would that break too much?)    Peter
>
In this specific instance, yes, but other pseudofiles would still need it.

My example was not a good one, I should have found a better one, sorry
for that.

>
>