From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Alan Cox Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 13:10:17 +0100 Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <1094040615.2474.50.camel@localhost.localdomain> References: <200408311931.i7VJV8kt028102@laptop11.inf.utfsm.cl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Horst von Brand , Pavel Machek , David Masover , Jamie Lokier , Chris Wedgwood , viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, Christoph Hellwig , Hans Reiser , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Linux Kernel Mailing List , Alexander Lyamin aka FLX , ReiserFS List Return-path: Received: from the-village.bc.nu ([81.2.110.252]:7051 "EHLO localhost.localdomain") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266467AbUIANMp (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Sep 2004 09:12:45 -0400 To: Linus Torvalds In-Reply-To: List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org On Maw, 2004-08-31 at 21:05, Linus Torvalds wrote: > In a graphical environment, the "icon" stream is a good example of this. > It literally has _nothing_ to do with the data in the main stream. The > only linkage is a totally non-technical one, where the user wanted to > associate a secondary stream with the main stream _without_ altering the > main one. THAT is where named streams make sense. The icon doesn't belong in the document, that was a catastrophic disaster in early MacOS (although they only use an index). Users want to manage their icon choices, tags, tooltip notes and attached labels, and you cannot do that in the file if you don't own the file. Also the icon is *not* unrelated to the file in a modern GUI, eg rox and nautilus uses scaled versions of the content for many media types and will show you pictures, frames from a movie etc to help you remember the content. On top they then add user specific annotations. The things that are more independant are: "This file was created by OpenOffice 1.2" "This is a text/plain file in UTF-8" "This file has a UUID of ...." The type has dragons because you get heirarchical typing within documents (consider XML containing namespaces) (UUIDs being one really useful thing we don't tag everywhere onto files that would be a godsend on the desktop providing they moved with the file on rename) Alan