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From: Jesse Pollard <jesse@cats-chateau.net>
To: Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>,
       Brian Pawlowski <beepy@netapp.com>
Subject: Re: FS: hardlinks on directories
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 16:29:50 -0500
Cc: aebr@win.tue.nl, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
References: <20030804134415.GA4454@win.tue.nl> <200308041542.h74Fg9k26251@orbit-fe.eng.netapp.com> <20030804175609.7301d075.skraw@ithnet.com>
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On Monday 04 August 2003 10:56, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 08:42:09 -0700 (PDT)
>
> Brian Pawlowski <beepy@netapp.com> wrote:
> > I'm still waking up, but '..' obviously breaks the "no cycle"
> > observations.
>
> Hear, hear ...
>
> > It's just that '..' is well known name by utilities as opposed
> > to arbitrary links.
>
> Well, that leads only to the point that ".." implementation is just lousy
> and it should have been done right in the first place. If there is a need
> for a loop or a hardlink (like "..") all you have to have is a standard way
> to find out, be it flags or the like, whatever. But taking the filename or
> anything not applicable to other cases as matching factor was obviously
> short-sighted.

Has nothing to do with the loop. It is called an AVL tree.

It makes the namei lookup function extreemly simple to implement:
"../file" is treated in the same way as "./file" is treated, which
is the same as "file". No special case required. It allows the VERY
flexable (and simple) relative path name handling.
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