Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Linus Torvalds
2004-09-01T06:10:20Z

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Hans Reiser wrote:
>
> You are saying, 1-2% simpler and better, no biggie, why work so hard to
> get it?
>
> And we are saying, 1-2% simpler and better, times thousands of
> applications, wow! That's a lot!

But would thousands care? Seriously?

For example, you could make just _one_ program support "openat()", and
you'd get most of the advantages, with no possibility of _breaking_ any of
thousands of applications..

I know, you've ignored the "runat" program (which is just a wrapper around
the openat() system call), but it _has_ been mentioned several times in
this thread. Yes, you'd type a bit more to do

runat file ls -l

instead of

ls -l file/

but at least the openat/runat approach also works for directories, which
does actually make it a lot more _generic_ than the "show in the regular
filespace" approach. No special cases.

So your comparison isn't valid, because you're ignoring the people who
shout "runat" at you. You've also not ever actually answered about the
problems about directories with attributes.

Linus