Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S268004AbUIGM1D (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Sep 2004 08:27:03 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267998AbUIGM1D (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Sep 2004 08:27:03 -0400 Received: from legaleagle.de ([217.160.128.82]:57514 "EHLO www.legaleagle.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267994AbUIGM0T (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Sep 2004 08:26:19 -0400 Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2004 14:26:22 +0200 From: Gunnar Ritter Organization: Privat. To: David Masover , Christer Weinigel Cc: Horst von Brand , viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, Linus Torvalds , Tonnerre , Spam , ReiserFS List , Hans Reiser , Pavel Machek , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, Jamie Lokier , Christoph Hellwig , Alexander Lyamin aka FLX , Chris Wedgwood , Christer Weinigel Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Message-ID: <413DA8EE.nailA301JQ74H@pluto.uni-freiburg.de> References: <200409070206.i8726vrG006493@localhost.localdomain> <413D4C18.6090501@slaphack.com> In-Reply-To: User-Agent: nail 11.6pre 9/7/04 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1762 Lines: 39 Christer Weinigel wrote: > Additionally, files-as-directores does not solve the problem of > "cp a b" losing named streams. There is curently no copyfile syscall > in the Linux kernel, "cp a b" essentially does "cat a >b". So unless > cp is modified we don't gain anything. If cp is modified to know > about named streams, it really does not matter if named streams are > accessed as file-as-directories, via openat(3) or via a shared library > with some other interface. You cannot just 'modify cp'. cp is a programming interface standardized in POSIX.1. You can of course add non-standard extensions to some cp implementations, but it seems hardly evitable then that you either have to use cp in a non-standard manner regularly with Linux or risk to lose data. This is even more severe with tar/pax. Just patching GNU tar for file streams, as it was suggested earlier in this discussion, is still far away from a real solution because it neither solves the issues with the POSIX.1 pax standard nor those with other implementations of it. Given these facts, it does not seem so clear to me that adding named streams for Windows and Mac OS interoperability would be a win to Linux in the end. The loss of interoperability to Unix/POSIX/today's Linux might have much worse effects. The current xattr extension is much less of a problem because it only holds metadata, which is mostly not applicable to other environments anyway. Gunnar -- http://omnibus.ruf.uni-freiburg.de/~gritter - 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/