Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Julian Blake Kongslie
2004-09-08T01:31:39Z

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On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 01:14:25 +0200, Gunnar Ritter
<Gunnar.Ritter@pluto.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
> Having a separate S_IFXXX type for streamed files would also give
> attention to portability issues easily. It might in fact be better
> to have existing applications fail explicitly with them than to
> make this as transparent as possible, but hope for good luck.
>
> Utilities like 'tar' would just say 'Unknown file type' or the like
> and exclude such files from the archives they create. This would lead
> the user's explicit attention to the data loss. He might then choose
> to ignore the error, or to get a special version of 'tar' to handle it.
>
> It would also be clear to programmers and users that such files are
> special things they don't normally need. Regular Linux installations
> might totally ignore them. If streamed files are only intended for
> use with CIFS or other special cases, that might be a more clean
> solution for this issue than watering down the existing portable
> file semantics.

You could actually use two S_IFXXX types - one for stream files which
should be archived by backup programs because they contain real
information, and a different one for stream files which should not be
archived because they are merely a different "view" of data from the main
file. This simplifies the archival problem because legacy programs would
complain that the file types aren't handled - alerting the user to
potential data loss, and updated programs would automatically backup only
the attributes that are required.

--
-Julian Blake Kongslie
<jblake@omgwallhack.org>

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