Re: named streams, extended attributes, and posix

Mo McKinlay
2001-01-19T15:21:22Z

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Today, Michael Rothwell (rothwell@holly-springs.nc.us) wrote:

> Thanks. I think having the option of the namespace augmentation would be
> useful, in terms of supporting existing filesystems. On NTFS, ":" is not
> a legal filename character anyway. The namespace augmentation suggested
> in the paper would allow filesystems like NTFS to work as they should,
> and all other filesystems to ignore it.

This was the tack I originally took - but I realised it would eventually
cause problems - not least because rather than returning an error when a
user does something not supported like most actions do, the operation
behaves differently - which is a little confusing.

(Take symbolic linking, for example - if you ln -s on VFAT, you get
'operation not permitted' - named stream/EA operations on a filesystem
that doesn't support them should return the same, IMHO).

Also, I don't like the idea of bypassing POSIX in this manner (using ':'
as a delimeter), even if the underlying filesystem *may* not support it.

What's to say that ext4 (or whatever) won't support named streams, but
still allow ':'? Your solution as it stands would break in that situation
(assuming I've not missed something :)

Mo.

- --
Mo McKinlay
mmckinlay@gnu.org
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