From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:15:19 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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: Rik van Riel In-Reply-To: List-Id: linux-fsdevel.vger.kernel.org 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. Linus