Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Linus Torvalds
2004-08-25T22:34:22Z

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Matt Mackall wrote:
> >
> > It's the UNIX way.
>
> I thought the UNIX way is "everything's a file", not "everything's a
> directory".

It really was. Directories were historically largely just files too,
although with the special "lookup" operation.

Historic unix didn't have readdir/rmdir/mkdir/rename or really much _any_
special directory handling. Directories were just files, and you read them
like files.

Of course, even in that early unix, "directories" were very much a
reality even apart from the fact that they happened to be implemented
pretty much like files. Nobody has ever claimed that the UNIX way is
"everything is _one_ file", after all ;)

> > Will it potentially break something? Sure. Do we care? Me, I'll take that
> > kind of extension _any_ day over xattrs, that are fundamentally flawed in
> > my opinion and totally useless.
>
> There's always the option that they're both broken.

Yes. Highly likely. However, something like that _does_ end up what a
Windows fileserver wants. IOW, even if it's broken, _something_ is likely
forced on us by that nasty thing we call "real users". Damn them.

Linus