Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Hans Reiser
2004-08-26T08:43:10Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:

>On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
>
>>For one thing _I_ didn't decide about xattrs anyway. And I still
>>haven't seen a design from you on -fsdevel how you try to solve the
>>problems with files as directories.
>>
>>
>
>Hey, files-as-directories are one of my pet things, so I have to side with
>Hans on this one. I think it just makes sense. A hell of a lot more sense
>than xattrs, anyway, since it allows scripts etc standard tools to touch
>the attributes.
>
>It's the UNIX way.
>
>And yes, the semantics can _easily_ be solved in very unixy ways.
>
>One way to solve it is to just realize that a final slash at the end
>implies pretty strongly that you want to treat it as a directory. So what
>you do is:
>
> - without the slash, a file-as-dir won't open with O_DIRECTORY (ENOTDIR)
> - with the slash, it won't open _without_ O_DIRECTORY (EISDIR)
>
>Problem solved. Very user-friendly, and very intuitive.
>
>Will it potentially break something? Sure. Do we care? Me, I'll take that
>kind of extension _any_ day over xattrs, that are fundamentally flawed in
>my opinion and totally useless. The argument that applications like "tar"
>won't understand the file-as-directory thing is _flawed_, since legacy
>apps won't understand xattrs either.
>
>Oh, add a O_NOXATTRS flag to force a path lookup to only use regular
>directories, the same way we have O_NOFOLLOW and friends. That allows
>people to see the difference, if they care (ie a file server might decide
>that it doesn't want to expose things like this).
>
>
I think we should require people to care enough to supply an O_NOMETAS
flag to see the difference.

>I never liked the xattr stuff. It makes little sense, and is totally
>useless for 99.9999% of everything. I still don't see the point of it,
>except for samba. Ugly.
>
> Linus
>
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