Re: [RFC PATCH] file as directory

["Ph. Marek" <philipp.marek@bmlv.gv.at>]

On Mittwoch, 23. Mai 2007, Al Viro wrote:
> Then I do not understand what this mechanism could be used for, other
> than an odd way to twist POSIX behaviour and see how much of the userland
> would survive that.
I have some similar considerations about how userspace should deal with that.

The behaviour of simply "cd file/" are not that robust, I fear ...


> Certainly not useful for your "look into tarball 
> as a tree", unless you seriously want to scan the entire damn fs for
> tarballs at mount time and set up a superblock for each.  And for per-file
> extended attributes/forks/whatever-you-call-that-abomination it also
> obviously doesn't help, since you lose them for directories.
Well, *use cases* I can see. I'd like to use that - for loop mounting, 
archives, possibly using symlinks to remote filesystems "symlink1 => 
ssh:user@ip" (although that's possible with FUSE anyway - but would be 
possibly within a .zip, too), ...


But I'm not sure how to do the presentation to userspace *right*.


How about some special node in eg. /proc (or a new filesystem)?
Eg.
   /fileAsDir/etc/passwd/owner ...
would work for all *files*. For directories we do not know whether we're still 
climbing the hierarchy or would like to see meta-data.

Some way like a ".this" entry is not the Right Way IMO ...
Well, I cannot imagine a real good way to tell where I'd like to stop 
following the "normal" filesystem and go into the "generated" hierarchy ...

   /fileAsDir/level-3/usr/local/bin/owner
is not nice.


Regards,

Phil