Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Linus Torvalds
2004-08-26T18:25:06Z

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> It's a relief to know that nobody's taking my humorous
> suggestion seriously, but now we still have the "standard
> Unix tools can't manipulate files" problem...

I disagree. They can manipulate the files a whole lot better than they can
manipulate xattr's.

For example, you _could_ probably (but hey, maybe "tar" tries to strip
slashes off the end of filenames, so this might not work due to silly
reasons like that) back up a compound file with

tar cvf file.tar file file/

although unpacking it would require that tar be taught about the thing.
And you definitely could write a script to do the thing, ie even with an
unmodified tar you could do

tar cvf file-archive.tar file
cd file
tar cvf ../attribute-archive.tar .

which is a hell of a lot better than what you can do with the fsattr
interfaces and unmodified legacy applications.

So one of the advantages of "dir-as-file/file-as-dir" is exactly that you
_can_ manipulate the data with legacy tools. Sure, things that traverse a
directory tree might need some (likely fairly trivial) modifications if
they really want to take advantage of the subfiles, but that's still
likely to be _much_ less of an issue than with fsattr's that have a
totally different model entirely.

Linus