Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives

David Masover
2004-09-03T23:55:29Z

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Helge Hafting wrote:
[...]
| You don't need kernel support for cd'ing into fs images.
| You need a shell (or GUI app) that:
| 1. notices that user tries to CD into a file, not a directory
| 2. Attempts fs type detection and do a loop mount.
| 3. Give error message if it wasn't a supported fs image.

You can argue this about FS plugins, too. You don't need kernel support
for cryptocompress, for example. Just have a fifo farm. Every file
that has compression turned on is actually a named pipe, the original
file is hidden (starts with a dot), and you have a script running to
each fifo which runs zcat.

The kernel support (read: interface) is just cleaner in some ways.

In the loop mount example, it isn't universal -- the user can't CD into
a file if they use the wrong shell, and two different shells might make
two different mounts. How many mounts before we run out of loop devices?

In the cryptocompress example, there's no caching or compress-on-flush
optimization, and it isn't entirely transparent to anything. It doesn't
look like a file, it looks like a fifo. ls will make it look yellow.
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