Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

David Lang
2004-08-26T23:08:53Z

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:

> On Thursday 26 August 2004 23:05, David Lang wrote:
>
>> I also don't see why the VFS/Filesystem can't decide that (for example)
>> this tar.gz is so active that instead of storing it as a tar.gz and
>> providing a virtual directory of the contents that it instead stores the
>> directory of the contents and makes the tar.gz virtual (regenerating it as
>> needed or as extra system resources are available)
>
> Because that would mean the kernel should "talk" the tar format, which is,
> IMHO, a Bad Idea (TM). Maybe the kernel could notify a user-space daemon to
> perform this task, instead.
>

the kernel will definantly need the ability to use user-space code to do
the transformations from one version to the other (if nothing else think
of the thumbnail version of images, we don't want the image manipulation
code in the kernel and we definantly want this sort of option available)

the interesting issue is going to be defining the kernel->user-space
interface for doing the extractions.

David Lang

--
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan