From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Christoph Hellwig Subject: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:25:21 +0200 Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <20040824202521.GA26705@lst.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from verein.lst.de ([213.95.11.210]:4007 "EHLO mail.lst.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S268270AbUHXUZ2 (ORCPT ); Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:25:28 -0400 To: akpm@osdl.org, reiser@namesys.com Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org After looking trough the code and mailinglists I'm quite unhappy with a bunch of user-visible changes that Hans sneaked in and make reiser4 incompatible with other filesystems and have a slight potential to break even in the kernel. o files as directories - O_DIRECTORY opens succeed on all files on reiser4. Besides breaking .htaccess handling in apache and glibc compilation this also renders this flag entirely useless and opens up the races it tries to prevent against cmpletely useless - meaning of the -x permission. This one has different meanings on directories vs files on UNIX systems. If we want to support directories as files we'll probably have to find a way to work around this. - dentry aliasing. I can't find a formal guarantee in the code this can't happen o metafiles - ..metas as a magic name that's just taken out of the namespace doesn't sound like a good idea. If we want this it should be a VFS-level option and there should be a translation-layer to xattrs. Not doing this will again confuse applications greatly that expect uniform filesystem behaviour. Given these problems I request that these interfaces are removed from reiser4 for the kernel merge, and if added later at the proper VFS level after discussion on linux-kernel and linux-fsdevel, like we did for xattrs.