Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Stephen Wille Padnos
2004-08-26T20:53:51Z

Rik van Riel wrote:

>On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
>>So "/tmp/bash" is _not_ two different things. It is _one_ entity, that
>>contains both a standard data stream (the "file" part) _and_ pointers to
>>other named streams (the "directory" part).
>>
>>
>Thinking about it some more, how would file managers and
>file chosers handle this situation ?
>
>Currently the user browses the directory tree and when
>the user clicks on something, one of the following
>happens:
>
>1) if it is a directory, the file manager/choser changes
> into that directory
>
>
How does the file manager / chooser decide whether you're trying to move
into a directory, or the meta-data-directory for a directory?
It's not just files that should have metadata - directories need* them
too. Making it possible to see attributes as a directory under a file
is great, but you'd still need an O_META flag for accessing directory
metadata (since there are already files under a directory).

>2) if it is a file, the file is opened
>
>Now how do we present things to users ?
>
>How will users know when an object can only be chdired
>into, or only be opened ?
>
>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 ?
>
>
MacOS does, Be did (sort of). I'm not sure it would be the end of the
world, as long as the data can be extracted.

>What happens when users want to transfer data from Linux
>to another system ?
>
>
That would depend on the other system. Data is easy, metadata is hard.
It would be possible to create an XML schema for metadata, and if
requested (O_EVERYTHING?), the file data is returned with all metadata
in XML tags. (not advocating this, just an idea :)
- Steve

* I say need in the same way as one *needs* to upgrade their 2GHz
computer - it would be nice :)