From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Alexander G. M. Smith" Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:16:08 -0400 EDT Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <88320341394-BeMail@cr593174-a> References: <41413A2B.9020405@namesys.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, reiserfs-list@namesys.com Return-path: Received: from smtp100.rog.mail.re2.yahoo.com ([206.190.36.78]:26289 "HELO smtp100.rog.mail.re2.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S267374AbUIJMQH (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Sep 2004 08:16:07 -0400 In-Reply-To: <41413A2B.9020405@namesys.com> To: Hans Reiser List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org Hans Reiser wrote on Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:22:51 -0700: > This was actually pretty decent as a design, but then a user on the > mailing list suggested replacing the '..' prefix with a subdirectory > prefix. I forget who suggested this and what the prefix was exactly. So > we then created a '..metas' subdirectory, and this had the advantage > that one could ls it to see all the builtins supported by a given > plugin. This is not an important advantage, and I encourage others to > critique it. Like I said before, it breaks orthogonality by introducing a directory which isn't a file/directory like the others. ..metas can't have attributes attached to it like other files can. In practical use, that makes it difficult to display in a GUI view, where you might want to attach attributes describing the ..metas directory window size and position. The GUI code would have to special case it, for those times when you want to drill down and see what's attached to a file. On the other hand, it does satisfy the Human need to group things together neatly, like you said. But then so does Tetris :-). - Alex