Re: creating live virtual files by concatenation

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Rik van Riel wrote:

>On Sat, 25 Feb 2006, Peter Foldiak wrote:
>
>  
>
>>"sub-file" corresponding to a key-range. Writing a chapter should change the
>>book that the chapter is part of. That is what would make it really valuable.
>>Of course it would have all sorts of implications (e.g. for metadata for each
>>part) that need to be thought about, but it could be done properly, I think.
>>    
>>
>
>What happens if you read the first 10kB of a file,
>and one of the "chapters" behind your read cursor
>grows?
>  
>
That is why you have magic delimiters, like the colons and newlines in
/etc/passwd.  You also specify the delimiters in your inheritance
syntax.  You don't want it to really all be one file, because you want
separation of modification times and acls that let users change their
own gecos field and etc., but there are times when you want to act on
/etc/passwd as one file.

>Do you read part of the same data again when you
>continue reading?
>
>Does the read cursor automatically advance?
>
>Your idea changes the way userspace expects files
>to behave...
>
>  
>