Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Markus Törnqvist
2004-08-26T07:53:48Z

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 12:32:00AM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
>
>What it breaks is the concept of a file. In ways that are ill-defined,
>not portable, hard to work with, and needlessly complex. Along the
>way, it breaks every single application that ever thought it knew what
>a file was.

It breaks the concept of a file. In ways that offer more versatility,
challenge the imagination to make even better progress and keeps
Linux competing with competitors who are implementing this stuff
as we speak.

I for one would truly welcome the coming of thumbnails and descriptions
in picture files, because I have a real-life project going on where
that would be extremely handy to have in the actual file.
Were I any richer, I'd pay Namesys to have this work for me :)

>Find some silly person with an iBook and open a shell on OS X. Use cp
>to copy a file with a resource fork. Oh look, the Finder has no idea
>what the new file is, even though it looks exactly identical in the
>shell. Isn't that _wonderful_? Now try cat < a > b on a file with a
>fork. How is that ever going to work?

Then I guess OS X ships a broken implementation of cp, yes?

On the cat example, what if cat < a > b simply copies the "main stream"
and not the metadata, as a feature. The key being, "as a feature"

The metadata streams could get file descriptors of their own OR
another program, streamcat or something, could be written to compensate.

>I like cat < a > b. You can keep your progress.

With all due respect, I hope not too many people agree with you :)

--
mjt