From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Woodhouse Subject: Re: Fallthrus as full-length symlinks? Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:18:26 +0000 Message-ID: <1258485506.6132.65.camel@macbook.infradead.org> References: <20091113174631.GD19656@shell> <200911131846.nADIkFR6022038@agora.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu> <20091117191349.GC17822@shell> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Erez Zadok , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Alexander Viro , Jan Blunck , Christoph Hellwig , Andy Whitcroft , Scott James Remnant , Sandu Popa Marius , Jan Rekorajski , "J. R. Okajima" , Arnd Bergmann , Vladimir Dronnikov , Felix Fietkau To: Valerie Aurora Return-path: Received: from casper.infradead.org ([85.118.1.10]:36438 "EHLO casper.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756213AbZKQTSf (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:18:35 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20091117191349.GC17822@shell> Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 14:13 -0500, Valerie Aurora wrote: > > I can't think of a way to do it without using up namespace - but > perhaps there is some part of the symlink target namespace that has no > valid meaning that we could use instead, like Arnd's self symlink. I think it's impossible to declare that, since the symlink namespace is fair game for userspace do use as it sees fit. Emacs and Mozilla lockfiles being but one example... [dwmw2@macbook ~]$ ls -l .#foo.html .mozilla/firefox/b8v9tyu0.default/lock lrwxrwxrwx. 1 dwmw2 dwmw2 44 2009-11-17 19:16 .#foo.html -> dwmw2@macbook.infradead.org.21271:1258450900 lrwxrwxrwx. 1 dwmw2 dwmw2 19 2009-11-17 09:51 .mozilla/firefox/b8v9tyu0.default/lock -> 90.155.92.212:+3756 I wouldn't want to bet that no userspace app has ever come up with the idea of using a symlink-to-self as a marker for something. I don't think it's good practice for us to be trying to play games like that. -- David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre David.Woodhouse@intel.com Intel Corporation