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:

V13> The only thing that changes (from the userland POV) is the way
V13> someone can enter the 'metadata directory'. This way you don't have
V13> to have a special name, just a special function and no existing
V13> application (like tar) can possibly break because it will not know
V13> how to enter this 'metadata directory'.

>> tar won't be able to backup the metadata.  That's the major breakage
>> of tar that we're worried about.

Spam>   However, if we do a "cp fileA fileB" then the metadata and
Spam> streams ought to be copied too, even if "cp" does not support
Spam> them.

Huh?  How do you plan on pulling that off?  Unless cp uses the
not-yet-existing copy syscall, if cp can't see the metadata or streams,
how is it going to copy it?

Spam> This is the real challenge. Backup tools like tar can be patched
Spam> just like it has so many times before.

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.

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