Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

[John Newbigin <jn@it.swin.edu.au>]

Christer Weinigel wrote:

> 
> I think that the "icon" argument for named streams is a silly
> argument, since different users may want to have different icons for
> the same file.  Say that I want /usr/bin/emacs to have the enterprise
> icon and someone else wants the gnu head icon.  And besides, root owns
> the file anyways, so neither of us mortal users should be able to add
> a stream to it.
> 
> Another reason for named streams that usually crops up is the ability
> set a "preferred application" for a certain file, so that when I
> double click on a document I want to open it with antiword instead of
> openoffice.  But the same contra-argument applies here, different
> users have different preferences.
> 
> I can see the argument for having the equivalent of Content-type or
> Content-transfer-encoding as a named stream though.
You still have the same problem with that.  What if I want to override 
the content-type for some reason.  (I have had to do this is the past, 
but not for root owned files.  In the end though I had to edit 
/etc/mailcap to do what I wanted :( )

You still have problems with icons.  What format should they be stored 
in?  If all this effort is to make samba work then would this mean a 
windows icon?  That is not going to make your X11 app happy.

This could probably all be solved with magic plugins in the filesystem 
(reiserfs style) but it is probably better to return to simple approach 
of "everything is a file".  The executable /usr/bin/emacs is a file. 
The way it looks on my desktop is a file ~/.desktop/emacs etc.  This is 
what most apps do currently and it works quite well.

Just my 2c


-- 
John Newbigin - Computer Systems Officer
School of Information Technology
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.it.swin.edu.au/staff/jnewbigin