From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S269826AbUH0A7A (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 20:59:00 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S269794AbUH0AyO (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 20:54:14 -0400 Received: from rwcrmhc12.comcast.net ([216.148.227.85]:19627 "EHLO rwcrmhc12.comcast.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S269757AbUHZXwa (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 19:52:30 -0400 Message-ID: <412E77BE.5070005@namesys.com> Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:52:30 -0700 From: Hans Reiser User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Andrew Morton CC: Spam , wichert@wiggy.net, jra@samba.org, torvalds@osdl.org, hch@lst.de, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, flx@namesys.com, reiserfs-list@namesys.com Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 References: <20040824202521.GA26705@lst.de> <412CEE38.1080707@namesys.com> <20040825152805.45a1ce64.akpm@osdl.org> <112698263.20040826005146@tnonline.net> <1453698131.20040826011935@tnonline.net> <20040825163225.4441cfdd.akpm@osdl.org> <20040825233739.GP10907@legion.cup.hp.com> <20040825234629.GF2612@wiggy.net> <1939276887.20040826114028@tnonline.net> <20040826024956.08b66b46.akpm@osdl.org> <839984491.20040826122025@tnonline.net> <20040826032457.21377e94.akpm@osdl.org> <742303812.20040826125114@tnonline.net> <20040826035500.00b5df56.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: <20040826035500.00b5df56.akpm@osdl.org> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.85.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Andrew Morton wrote: > >No. All of the applications which you initially identified can be >implemented by putting the various bits of data into a single file and >getting applications to agree on the format of that file. > >For example, some image file formats already support embedded metadata, do >they not? > >- > > and that leads to vasts numbers of file formats, all of which require special code to parse them, and apps that don't duplicate that code can't access the data, and it is a software engineering mistake. Uniform interfaces greatly reduce the cost of an OS and increase its expressive power. Closure is the most important and least understood principle of OS design. By contrast, suppose everything was stored in files and directories. Every app can afford the coding cost to learn about files and directories. Data can freely bounce from one object to another in the OS because the APIs for the objects are all the same. That's increased expressive power. The number of connections between objects determines the expressive power of the OS, not the number of objects in it. Unified namespaces do a lot for an OS. Hans