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From: Peter Samuelson <peter@cadcamlab.org>
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Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 20:05:05 -0600 (CST)
To: "Michael Rothwell" <rothwell@holly-springs.nc.us>
Cc: "James H. Cloos Jr." <cloos@jhcloos.com>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: named streams, extended attributes, and posix
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  [Peter Samuelson]
> > What if you copy both 'filename' and 'filename:ext' onto the same
> > fs?  Do they get combined into one file?

[Michael Rothwell]
> ON Ext2, you get two files. On NTFS, you get one file, and a stream
> on that file.

Yeah.  I think that's broken.  It gets worse when you start doing other
posixy things.  Say you do 'mv foo bar:baz' on an ntfs partition.
Those strong in the force will recall that rename() is supposed to
atomically unlink 'bar:baz'.  Instead you seem to be asking it to add
an extra stream to 'bar'.  So should we still unlink the old 'bar'?
And then what if 'foo' is a multi-stream file?  Where do the extra
streams go?  Or do you just get a big fat -EINVAL for every special
case?

I think ultimately there is no posixy (or least-surprise) way to deal
with such things.  If we truly need forks, we need a new api to
manipulate them.  Cleverness with ':' or '/' only takes you so far.

Peter
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