Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Martin J. Bligh
2004-08-26T20:59:05Z

--On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:15:19 -0700 Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
> 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.

What would "test -d" and "test -f" return on these magic beasties? I can't
think of any combinations that wouldn't confuse the crap out of userspace.

M.