Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to document the idea of what reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why

[Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca>]

>>>>> "Spam" == Spam  <spam@tnonline.net> writes:

>> Yes.  And if we can get file-as-dir, then we only need to patch tar
>> once, since everything can be exported through that interface.

Spam>   Yes. This seem to be an acceptable way to do things. But next
Spam> time someone comes and want to do changes like this we need to
Spam> start patching things again. ...

But that's my point.  Anything that I can imagine anyone ever wanting to
extend the filesystem to do can be exported through this file-as-dir
system.  ACLs (or insert your favourite access-control scheme here),
xattrs, streams.  If you want to add something new, just make sure that
it can be seen through the file-as-dir interface, and you don't need to
patch tar again.  Want to use mandatory access control instead of
acl's?  Just export through foo.txt/metas/mac_level, and tar will catch
it with no problems.  Want to let your streams have substreams too?
export through foo.txt/streams/bar/streams/baz, and tar will still
catch it.

And you get the added bonus that you can use any program to edit these
extra things, no modifications needed.

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Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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