Re: reiser4 plugins

David Masover
2005-07-06T18:09:55Z

Horst von Brand wrote:
> Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 01 Jul 2005 03:41:00 -0400, Chet Hosey <chosey@nauticom.net> said:
>>
>>>Horst von Brand wrote:
>>>
>>>>And who says that a normal user isn't allowed to annotate each and
>>>>every file with its purpose or something else?
>
>
>>Explain how you currently allow users to annotate arbitrary files.
>
>
> By keeping annotations /outside/ the files.
>
> [...]
>
>
>>The situation is even better with file-as-dir. If the administrator
>>wants to allow users to edit the description metadata for the file foo,
>>the administrator can set the appropriate permissions for
>>foo/.../description, and keep foo read-only.
>
>
> So now root is responsible in exquisite detail for random other users being
> able to keep info about my files?

If it's the general info that's associated with the file, and may even
be stored inside the file, then yes, that's fair.

Although I could certainly imagine foo/.../descriptions being a
directory that's world-writable, allowing each user to maintain their
own file inside of it. You can even set these per-user descriptions to
be stored somewhere else, like the user's home directory, and that could
work for CDs.

>>Actually, you could use something like unionfs to allow users to keep
>>their own annotations without affecting everyone else's.
>
>
> Again, root has to mount that stuff for each and every user?

Why is that a problem? Put it in a script. Mount each user's unionfs
at boot.

And it's "something like unionfs" -- maybe it's a feature of metafs or
reiserfs that we haven't thought of yet. It certainly can't be unionfs
as it stands, as unionfs doesn't work on top of any reiser.