From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hans Reiser Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:48:10 -0700 Message-ID: <412E76BA.9000305@namesys.com> References: <20040825152805.45a1ce64.akpm@osdl.org> <112698263.20040826005146@tnonline.net> <1453698131.20040826011935@tnonline.net> <20040825163225.4441cfdd.akpm@osdl.org> <20040825233739.GP10907@legion.cup.hp.com> <20040825234629.GF2612@wiggy.net> <1939276887.20040826114028@tnonline.net> <20040826024956.08b66b46.akpm@osdl.org> <839984491.20040826122025@tnonline.net> <20040826105404.GH2612@wiggy.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Spam , Andrew Morton , jra@samba.org, torvalds@osdl.org, hch@lst.de, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, flx@namesys.com, reiserfs-list@namesys.com Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com To: Wichert Akkerman In-Reply-To: <20040826105404.GH2612@wiggy.net> List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org Wichert Akkerman wrote: >Previously Spam wrote: > > >> Because having user space tools and code will make it not work with >> everything. Keeping stuff in the kernel should make the new features >> transparent to the applications. >> >> > >But having it in the kernel has the same problem. If you read the >Solaris documentation you will see that a bunch of utilties had to >get a new commandline option to be able to access the metadata and >a special utility was added for other applications. > They did it wrong. > If you look >at windows you will see that you need to use a filename like >::$DATA (which obviously does not work for >single-character filenames). > > again, they did it wrong. See Rob Pike's "The Hideous Name" for why that is wrong. >Ignoring samba for a bit which just needs streams to stay compatible >with windows I see few reasons for using streams: > >* files are more complex these days and tend to include multiple > different things: images with thumbnails and exif data, 'office' > documents containing both text and images > >* standard way to add common metadata to a file which can be used for > searching tools (author, copyright, keywords, etc.) > >But both can already be done in userland (modern image formats can store >thumbnails and exif data internally, applications use tar or zip-like >files for documents, etc.). The metadata part is a lot more complicated >as well since the behaviour of attributes might need to be complex: >if I change an image using an application that is not stream-aware, what >should happen to its thumbnail? > >The only common benefits I can see are standardisation and optimization: >instead of every file format or application defining a way to specify >metadata for a file you get a common API defined by the OS (but you'll >still need to standardize on attribute names and formats, so plenty of >room that will still not help), and instead of parsing different files >or XML streams you can directly access a bit of metadata. > >So far I'm not convinced that streams are worth the effort. Not that my >opinion is all that relevant here, but still :) > >Wichert. > > >