From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S269526AbUHZU7F (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:59:05 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S269636AbUHZU41 (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:56:27 -0400 Received: from e5.ny.us.ibm.com ([32.97.182.105]:50863 "EHLO e5.ny.us.ibm.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267770AbUHZUtJ (ORCPT ); Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:49:09 -0400 Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:44:06 -0700 From: "Martin J. Bligh" To: Linus Torvalds , Rik van Riel cc: Diego Calleja , jamie@shareable.org, christophe@saout.de, vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua, christer@weinigel.se, spam@tnonline.net, akpm@osdl.org, wichert@wiggy.net, jra@samba.org, reiser@namesys.com, 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 Message-ID: <45010000.1093553046@flay> In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: Mulberry/2.1.2 (Linux/x86) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org --On Thursday, August 26, 2004 11:15:19 -0700 Linus Torvalds 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.