Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Tonnerre
2004-08-31T08:15:28Z

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Salut,

On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 08:39:25PM -0400, Alexander G. M. Smith wrote:
> I mostly agree, like I was saying earlier, file types are needed!
> The kernel doesn't have to know about all of them, just some of
> them. It should be possible to attach a file type to everything so
> you know what kind of thing it is, not just block or character
> device or file, but something like a MIME type.

Then store the value computed by libmagic into an extended attribute,
if you like. I still don't see why the kernel should even care. It
shouldn't read things from files anyway, as a kernel shall be bootable
on a busybox system (and *Step) as well, so we don't rely on the fs
layout in any way.

> Optionally the kernel could also maintain the global list of all
> file types and their properties (such as which ones are indexed,
> which are computed), though that could also be done in userland if
> you aren't doing indexing or computed attributes or other fancy
> operations.

Quel horreur!

Do it in userland, really.

If I get the time, I'll write you a small daemon based on libmagic
which stores the file attributes in xattrs, or if they're not
supported, in some MacOS/Xish per-directory files. Even a file manager
("finder") can do that, there's not even the need for a daemon.

Tonnerre

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