Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267583AbUICEg7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Sep 2004 00:36:59 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267732AbUICEg7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Sep 2004 00:36:59 -0400 Received: from pointblue.com.pl ([81.219.144.6]:1548 "EHLO pointblue.com.pl") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267583AbUICEgz (ORCPT ); Fri, 3 Sep 2004 00:36:55 -0400 Message-ID: <4137F4D9.7040206@pointblue.com.pl> Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 06:36:41 +0200 From: =?UTF-8?B?R3J6ZWdvcnogSmHFm2tpZXdpY3o=?= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jamie Lokier Cc: Rik van Riel , Denis Vlasenko , Matt Mackall , Nicholas Miell , Wichert Akkerman , Jeremy Allison , Andrew Morton , Spam , torvalds@osdl.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 References: <200408261034.38509.vda@port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua> <20040826121223.GG30449@mail.shareable.org> In-Reply-To: <20040826121223.GG30449@mail.shareable.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1353 Lines: 32 Jamie Lokier wrote: >Note that file-as-directory doesn't imply that you can store just >anything into those directories. > >Is it a problem to decree that "file data MUST NOT be stored in a >metadata directory; only non-essential metadata and data computed from >the file data may be stored"? > > That's exactly what folks seem to lost in this debate. We (developers) want to have files as dirs to: * be able to extract/modify file part on fly. For instance, simple .iso file, without need to mount it over loop (btw, if someone is going to redesign VFS, can we handle that kinda case too please?), .tar, or unzipped (kernel can handle zips) "streams". File is a stream, why shouldn't I have a chance to grab a stream out of archive/image than ? * be able to store metadata, that doesn't matter on copy, and even should not be copied sometimes. Things like thumbnails, metainformation (used for search). All of these extracted from acctual file (either by VFS 'plugins', or by userspace application), and saved there so that it can be used later on. So we save some time on extracting it. -- GJ - 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/