Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Markus Törnqvist
2004-09-01T19:44:56Z

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 01:05:40PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>There's no point to having the kernel export information that is already
>inherent in the main stream.

As said before, it can be bounced :)

You have support for streams, someone could read the inherent information
and write it to the stream. At the risk of these two streams being
unsynced temporarily, requiring some syncer.

>I've seen all these examples of exposing MP3 ID information as a "side
>stream", and that's TOTALLY POINTLESS! The information is already there,

No it's not pointless :)

>it's in a standard format, and exporting it as a stream buys you
>absolutely nothing.

There is no nice standard way of finding MP3s by the ID information.

find music/ -name *mp3/..metas/id3/ | xargs grep -i "dream theater"

or something. Which reveals the metadata to find.
The kernel doesn't have to parse the ID3 tags, that can be handled in
userspace by a daemon, updated based on mtimes or somesuch, yes?

>Which means that normally we really don't _want_ named streams. In 99% of
>all cases we can use equally good - and _much_ simpler - tool-based
>solutions.

Sure, when someone goes through every application from ls to nautilus
and rams a tool-based patch down the app maintainer's throat and then
we're still dependent on the filesystem layout, which is easier to break
than the filesystem itself :)

>Which means that the only _real_ technical issue for supporting named
>streams really ends up being things like samba, which want named streams

So they should be implemented for samba and other guys can come up with
alternative means for using them ;)

--
mjt