Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Jamie Lokier
2004-08-26T20:59:11Z

Rik van Riel wrote:
> For objects that do both, how does the user choose ?
>
> Do we really want to have a file paradigm that's different
> from the other OSes out there ?

What does MacOS X do? Someone said that documents are directories in
it; it must know how to handle that.

What does Windows do when you click on a .zip file and WinZIP is
installed? It opens the .zip file and lets you explore inside. When
you click on a .doc file, though, it opens a viewer or editor -- you
don't get the option to look inside.

> What happens when users want to transfer data from Linux
> to another system ?

This is why I favour storing all essential metadata (about the file's
content) inside the file's contents, the primary stream.

We have another problem: what happens when users want to transfer data
from Windows (with secondary streams) and MacOS (with resource forks)?

-- Jamie