Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Mon, 7 Oct 2002 16:39:41 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Mon, 7 Oct 2002 16:39:36 -0400 Received: from neon-gw-l3.transmeta.com ([63.209.4.196]:59403 "EHLO neon-gw.transmeta.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Mon, 7 Oct 2002 16:39:33 -0400 Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 13:44:05 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Alan Cox cc: Andrew Morton , Daniel Phillips , "Martin J. Bligh" , Oliver Neukum , Rob Landley , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: The reason to call it 3.0 is the desktop (was Re: [OT] 2.6 not 3.0 - (NUMA)) In-Reply-To: <1034021669.26502.19.camel@irongate.swansea.linux.org.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2067 Lines: 46 On 7 Oct 2002, Alan Cox wrote: > > Factoring the uid/gid/pid in actually may help in other ways. If we are > doing it by pid or by uid we will reduce the interleave of multiple > files thing you sometimes get 'pid' would probably work better than what we have now, even though I bet it would get confused by a large number of installers (ie "make install" in just about any project will use multiple different processes to copy over separate subdirectories. In the X11R6 tree it uses individual "cp" processes for each file!) The session ID would avoid some of that, but they both have a fundamental problem: neither pid nor session ID is actually saved in any directory structure, so it's quite hard to use that as a heuristic for whether a new file should go into the same directory group as the directory it is created in. That's why "uid" would work better. The uid has a different issue, though, namely the fact that when user directories are created, they are basically always created as uid 0 first, and then a "chown" - which means that the user heuristic wouldn't actually trigger at the right time. So the heuristic couldn't be just "newfile->uid == directory->uid", it would have to be something better. I think last time we had the discussion, time-based things were also felt were good heuristics in many cases.. It could also be good to have an additional static hint on whether directories should be spread out or not. Administrators could set the "spread out" bit on the /, /home and /var/spool/(news|mail) directories, for example, causing those to spread out their subdirectories. but not causing normal user activity to do so. Yeah, yeah, I know there are papers on this. I don't care. I think something has to be done, and last time the discussion petered out at about this point. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/