From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dave Kleikamp Subject: Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives (was: silent semantic changes with reiser4) Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 12:41:52 -0500 Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <1094146912.31495.13.camel@shaggy.austin.ibm.com> References: <20040826150202.GE5733@mail.shareable.org> <200408282314.i7SNErYv003270@localhost.localdomain> <20040901200806.GC31934@mail.shareable.org> <1094118362.4847.23.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20040902161130.GA24932@mail.shareable.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Alan Cox , Linus Torvalds , Horst von Brand , Adrian Bunk , Hans Reiser , viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, Christoph Hellwig , fsdevel , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Alexander Lyamin aka FLX , ReiserFS List Return-path: Received: from e31.co.us.ibm.com ([32.97.110.129]:43940 "EHLO e31.co.us.ibm.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S268716AbUIBRoH (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Sep 2004 13:44:07 -0400 To: Jamie Lokier In-Reply-To: <20040902161130.GA24932@mail.shareable.org> List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 11:11, Jamie Lokier wrote: > Firstly, if I have to do it from a Gnome program, about the only > program where looking in a tar file is visibly useful is Nautilus. > Ironically, clicking on a tar file in Nautilus doesn't work, despite > having a dependency on gnome-vfs2. :/ This should be fixed in Nautilus, not the kernel. > Secondly, no, Gnome and MC don't support entering a container file, > letting you make changes in it, and remembering those changes to > _lazily_ regenerate the container file when you need it linearized, > possibly months later or never, by some unrelated program. Why do this in a tar file? tar = "tape archive". It isn't designed to be a file system. Sure, it's nice to have tools that make it easier to access files in a tar file, but to this isn't a job for the kernel. > Thirdly, you must be referring to the Gnome versions of Bash, Make, > GCC, coreutils and Perl which I haven't found. Perhaps we have a > different idea of what "supports this" means :) Please don't tell me that we have expectations to run make from within a tar file. This is getting silly. tar does a pretty good job of extracting files into real directories, and putting them back into an archive. I don't see a need to teach the kernel how to deal with compound files when user space can do it very easily. Shaggy