Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Hans Reiser
2004-09-10T16:32:38Z

Alexander G. M. Smith wrote:

>Hans Reiser wrote on Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:22:51 -0700:
>
>
>>This was actually pretty decent as a design, but then a user on the
>>mailing list suggested replacing the '..' prefix with a subdirectory
>>prefix. I forget who suggested this and what the prefix was exactly. So
>>we then created a '..metas' subdirectory, and this had the advantage
>>that one could ls it to see all the builtins supported by a given
>>plugin. This is not an important advantage, and I encourage others to
>>critique it.
>>
>>
>
>Like I said before, it breaks orthogonality by introducing a directory
>which isn't a file/directory like the others. ..metas can't have
>attributes attached to it like other files can.
>
That does not have to be true. Whether ..metas contains only builtins
can be nothing more than a style convention, or it can be a plugin
property for plugins that don't want other files to pretend to be their
builtins.

> In practical use,
>that makes it difficult to display in a GUI view, where you might want
>to attach attributes describing the ..metas directory window size and
>position. The GUI code would have to special case it, for those times
>when you want to drill down and see what's attached to a file.
>
>On the other hand, it does satisfy the Human need to group things
>together neatly, like you said. But then so does Tetris :-).
>
>- Alex
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