Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Denis Vlasenko
2004-08-26T07:36:26Z

> > > A file is a stream of bytes.
> >
> > "OMG! It breaks tar and email!!!" argument doesn't fly. Things break all
> > the time and are fixed. It's called progress.
>
> 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.
>
> Progress? No, this has been done before. Various dead operating
> systems have done it or similar and regretted it. Most recently MacOS,
> which jumped through major hurdles to begin purging themselves of
> resource forks when they went to OS X. They're still there, but
> heavily deprecated.
>
> > cp, grep, cat, and tar will continue to work just fine on files with
> > multiple streams.
>
> 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?
>
> I like cat < a > b. You can keep your progress.

cat <a >b does not preserve following file properties even on standard
UNIX filesystems: name,owner,group,permissions.
--
vda