Re: xattr names for unprivileged stacking?

Matthew Wilcox
2020-08-31T13:23:48Z

On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 01:51:20PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 1:37 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> > As I said to Dave, you and I have a strong difference of opinion here.
> > I think that what you are proposing is madness. You're making it too
> > flexible which comes with too much opportunity for abuse.
>
> Such as?

One proposal I saw earlier in this thread was to do something like
$ runalt /path/to/file ls
which would open_alt() /path/to/file, fchdir to it and run ls inside it.
That's just crazy.

> > I just want
> > to see alternate data streams for the same filename in order to support
> > existing use cases. You seem to be able to want to create an entire
> > new world inside a file, and that's just too confusing.
>
> To whom? I'm sure users of ancient systems with a flat directory
> found directory trees very confusing. Yet it turned out that the
> hierarchical system beat the heck out of the flat one.

Which doesn't mean that multiple semi-hidden hierarchies are going to
be better than one visible hierarchy.