Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Hans Reiser
2004-08-27T00:59:00Z

Andrew Morton wrote:

>
>No. All of the applications which you initially identified can be
>implemented by putting the various bits of data into a single file and
>getting applications to agree on the format of that file.
>
>For example, some image file formats already support embedded metadata, do
>they not?
>
>-
>
>
and that leads to vasts numbers of file formats, all of which require
special code to parse them, and apps that don't duplicate that code
can't access the data, and it is a software engineering mistake.
Uniform interfaces greatly reduce the cost of an OS and increase its
expressive power. Closure is the most important and least understood
principle of OS design.

By contrast, suppose everything was stored in files and directories.
Every app can afford the coding cost to learn about files and
directories. Data can freely bounce from one object to another in the
OS because the APIs for the objects are all the same. That's increased
expressive power. The number of connections between objects determines
the expressive power of the OS, not the number of objects in it.
Unified namespaces do a lot for an OS.

Hans