Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Christoph Hellwig
2004-08-26T10:59:14Z

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 11:53:30AM +0100, Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Hans Reiser wrote:
> > being able to cat dirname/pseudos/cat and get a
> > concatenation of all of the files is nice, and being able to cat
> > dirname/pseudos/tar and get an archive of the directory is nice
>
> Yes. Being able to cd into filename.tar.gz and filename.iso is also
> nice, but all of these features should be supported by the VFS
> generically, not in any specific filesystem, and there should be a
> hook to invoke the various fun filesystem-independent handlers by name.

It doesn't belong into the kernel at all. If at all it belongs into a
userspace filesystems, but even in that case the magic detection of
which one to use is kinda hard. You absoutely don't want to hardcode
file formats in the kernel.