Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Spam
2004-08-26T13:56:29Z

> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Spam wrote:

>> Yes, JPEG, TIFF and PNG files for example. But, if you modify any of
>> these with an application that doesn't support the extensions then
>> you will loose them.

> OK, so we've got a choice.

> Either we will lose the extensions when modifying the file
> with an unaware program, or you lose the extensions when
> copying (or restoring from backup) using an unaware program.

> Personally I'd prefer to keep the file intact when not
> modifying it...

Backup to me is a special case, not simply a copy of files, but also
retaining all the extra data, info, attributes, etc, that comes with
the file.

Enabling support to have all of this extra stuff below the
application level it will be possible to retain everything even
though applications do not support them.

Backup tools, however, must know about these new features to be able
to backup them. And so will every tool that directly accesses the
filesystem instead of using the OS API for it.

And from I learned in an earlier message, tools like cp actually
work on the fs level and themselves move the data to the new file
instead of letting the OS handle it. This seem to me as it could
be dangerous and could also prevent any kind of enhancements to the
FS unless every tool like cp is patched.