Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S268298AbUIBMzA (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Sep 2004 08:55:00 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S268301AbUIBMzA (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Sep 2004 08:55:00 -0400 Received: from smtp.andrew.cmu.edu ([128.2.10.82]:15006 "EHLO smtp.andrew.cmu.edu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S268298AbUIBMy1 (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Sep 2004 08:54:27 -0400 Message-ID: <41371702.8030704@andrew.cmu.edu> Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 08:50:10 -0400 From: James Bruce User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 (X11/20040830) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds CC: Hans Reiser , David Masover , Jamie Lokier , Horst von Brand , Adrian Bunk , viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, Christoph Hellwig , linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Alexander Lyamin aka FLX , ReiserFS List Subject: Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives References: <20040826150202.GE5733@mail.shareable.org> <200408282314.i7SNErYv003270@localhost.localdomain> <20040901200806.GC31934@mail.shareable.org> <20040902002431.GN31934@mail.shareable.org> <413694E6.7010606@slaphack.com> <4136A14E.9010303@slaphack.com> <4136C876.5010806@namesys.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1453 Lines: 35 Linus Torvalds wrote: >... >But _my_ point is, no user program is going to take _advantage_ of >anything that only one filesystem on one system offers. > >So there's no point. > >It's much saner (from _any_ app standpoint) to roll their own database in >user space - that way it just works. > >In other words, nobody is really ever going to take advantage of this. >This is _not_ how technical advanncement happens. The way you get people >to take advantage of something is to have a nice gradual ramp-up, not a >sudden new feature that they can't realistically use. >... > Sure, but there are plenty of existing interfaces that you could emulate. One could make a small library to use a transactional filesystem to implement the Berkely DB interface (libdb) for example. So on filesystems without such support your app could use the regular userspace database, but on a transactional filesystem it'd just use regular files, which would simplify database management and likely increase performance over the userspace-only version (libdb is pretty slow). In terms of functionality it'd just be a drop-in replacement, just like math libraries that use MMX/SSE when available. - Jim Bruce - 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/