Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Timothy Miller
2004-09-10T15:47:46Z

Hans Reiser wrote:
> Peter Foldiak wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 06:22, Hans Reiser wrote:
>>
>>
>>> He asked me, why not just access a filename's size as filename/size?
>>>
>>
>>
>> I now understand that you need a way to distinguish between something
>> like
>>
>> shoe/size
>>
>> and
>>
>> shoe/.../size (or shoe/..size)
>>
>> The first one is the size of the shoe, the second is the automatically
>> generated size of the file (object). You would get into trouble if you
>> would not allow the user to use shoe/size for shoe size. Peter
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> exactly.
>
> Of course, problem/shoe/size could refer to shoe size in centimeters of
> a problem shoe or the size of the problem relating to a shoe in units of
> reporters providing press coverage of it or....
>
> So there are lots of opportunities for ambiguity in semantics....
>
> Still, widely used builtins seem like they should be moderately evasive
> of commonly used names.

You know, if tools all need to be rewritten anyway to deal with the file
metadata "directory", then why not change the symbol that delimits the
metadata key?

Everyone likes ':', so we'd have "problem/shoe:size". (Don't bother to
complain about files which have : in them, because I already know it
sucks, but it's an example.)

See, unless you can come up with a way to seamlessly make old tools work
with the new semantics, then there's no reason not to make more than one
change to tools at at the same time.

Also, if you take the ':' example literally, then the file system would
need to be able to figure out that a file whose literal name is
"C:\MYPR0NDIR\BODY_PARTS.JPG" isn't referring to metadata for a file
named "C". :)