Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Rik van Riel
2004-08-26T20:10:48Z

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> So "/tmp/bash" is _not_ two different things. It is _one_ entity, that
> contains both a standard data stream (the "file" part) _and_ pointers to
> other named streams (the "directory" part).

Thinking about it some more, how would file managers and
file chosers handle this situation ?

Currently the user browses the directory tree and when
the user clicks on something, one of the following
happens:

1) if it is a directory, the file manager/choser changes
into that directory

2) if it is a file, the file is opened

Now how do we present things to users ?

How will users know when an object can only be chdired
into, or only be opened ?

For objects that do both, how does the user choose ?

Do we really want to have a file paradigm that's different
from the other OSes out there ?

What happens when users want to transfer data from Linux
to another system ?

--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan