From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Martin J. Bligh" Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:44:06 -0700 Message-ID: <45010000.1093553046@flay> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Diego Calleja , jamie@shareable.org, christophe@saout.de, vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua, christer@weinigel.se, spam@tnonline.net, akpm@osdl.org, wichert@wiggy.net, jra@samba.org, reiser@namesys.com, 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: Linus Torvalds , Rik van Riel In-Reply-To: Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org --On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:15:19 -0700 Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Rik van Riel wrote: >> >> It's a relief to know that nobody's taking my humorous >> suggestion seriously, but now we still have the "standard >> Unix tools can't manipulate files" problem... > > I disagree. They can manipulate the files a whole lot better than they can > manipulate xattr's. > > For example, you _could_ probably (but hey, maybe "tar" tries to strip > slashes off the end of filenames, so this might not work due to silly > reasons like that) back up a compound file with > > tar cvf file.tar file file/ > > although unpacking it would require that tar be taught about the thing. > And you definitely could write a script to do the thing, ie even with an > unmodified tar you could do > > tar cvf file-archive.tar file > cd file > tar cvf ../attribute-archive.tar . > > which is a hell of a lot better than what you can do with the fsattr > interfaces and unmodified legacy applications. > > So one of the advantages of "dir-as-file/file-as-dir" is exactly that you > _can_ manipulate the data with legacy tools. Sure, things that traverse a > directory tree might need some (likely fairly trivial) modifications if > they really want to take advantage of the subfiles, but that's still > likely to be _much_ less of an issue than with fsattr's that have a > totally different model entirely. What would "test -d" and "test -f" return on these magic beasties? I can't think of any combinations that wouldn't confuse the crap out of userspace. M.