Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Stuart Young
2004-09-04T05:10:47Z

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004 05:17, Horst von Brand wrote:
> Stuart Young <cef-lkml@optusnet.com.au> said:
> > Hence why I was suggesting the idea of disposable data in streams. As
> > long as people KNOW it's disposable, but useful to keep around as it cuts
> > down the time needed to do stuff, then apps will start to pick up
> > transporting streams properly. Least then (hopefully) no real information
> > will get lost that is important. Once transporting streams becomes
> > commonplace, then perhaps streams can be used for more useful things.
>
> How will you prevent people putting the "real" data under some random
> stream, "just because it is a prettier name"?

This is a function of exporting something complex like file streams through a
namespace like 'file-as-directory'. As soon as you start putting complex
things like file streams through an 'easy to use' interface, you will get
people using it in ways you don't expect. Sure, it has to be useful, and
relatively easy, but you don't need to make it insanely so.

And if it's all considered volatile, the only ones that NEED to know about it
are system admins, power users and programmers, all of which have a much
higher chance of understanding a complex object like a file stream.

> (Yes, I've seen Windows users
> exporting everything because they found the folder + hand icon
> prettier...). Short answer: You can't. And if you did, then it would be
> (another) hell to go through when you start using streams for "useful
> data".

Interesting you should say that. Pretty much every stream in Windows at the
moment is considered to be volatile, as the information could be lost in a
transfer to a networked machine or filesystem that is not stream enabled.
Once Windows NT and Win98/ME are 'out of the picture', and FAT* filesystems
vanish, this sort of behaviour could possibly be expected to change. Notice
that it's a timeframe over about 5 yrs that they've been (almost silently)
doing this already. They'll have much the same problem. Since I seriously
doubt that streams are going to pop up in Linux overnight, with all the app
support that this entails, we'll have the benefit of seeing just how the
behemoth handles it, and be able to learn from their mistakes.

Of note on this, the ability to create/manipulate/read/etc streams should
almost certainly require it's own set of ACL's beyond blindly assuming that
the standard permissions/ACL's can cover it as is. Document creators should
be able to create/manipulate a stream, but a searching service does not
necessarily need to do more than read it. You could even have the ability to
access or write to a stream other than the default covered by a capability.

> > The point of such information in my examples is that a stream can store
> > information in a particular format (ie: an index) that is common to one
> > indexing app/library.
>
> Great. Now you just need to convince everybody and Aunt Tillie to use that
> same format.

Welcome to standardisation. And in fact it's not so much necessary that
everyone uses the same index format, as long as the same index format is used
on one machine. In fact, it's not even that necessary, as each index format
could use it's own stream to store it's version of the information. Yes it's
duplication, but who isn't already used to that? (KDE/Gnome, vi/emacs,
ext3/XFS/reiser/etc). You choose the format for the job, and by personal
preference. If the apps don't support the format you want, you just lose
whatever abilities the format gains you, but at least you don't lose the raw
data.

> > Such an index can be used by ANY app that knows the
> > index format to search the document. This is almost exactly what MS will
> > do (if they haven't done it already) with the File Indexing Service. As
> > it's ONE library, then any new user app that creates data can add index
> > creation by adding one library. And any app that wants to search these
> > indexes would need only to add one library, not every library for every
> > format that it wants to search. It's essentially an n^2 vs 2n problem.
>
> Doable if you can just go and force a format/stream layout/application
> suite on each and every user. Won't happen in Linux (and I'm happy for
> that).

As above.

My personal view of streams (if we MUST have it under Linux, and I'm in no way
at all convinced of that fact) is that it should in many ways be like
journaling or hash trees in ext3. They're useful functions, but they are not
'necessary' to the actual storage of data. Sure, they make it easy (and in
some cases significantly easier) to recover or access data, but they are
features that do not ultimately stop you using the core of the filesystem,
it's main objective, which is storing data.

--
Stuart Young (aka Cef)
cef-lkml@optusnet.com.au is for LKML and related email only