Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S268700AbUIGWKG (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Sep 2004 18:10:06 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S268702AbUIGWKG (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Sep 2004 18:10:06 -0400 Received: from 212-28-208-94.customer.telia.com ([212.28.208.94]:18960 "EHLO www.dewire.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S268700AbUIGWJ4 (ORCPT ); Tue, 7 Sep 2004 18:09:56 -0400 From: Robin Rosenberg To: William Stearns Subject: Re: silent semantic changes in reiser4 (brief attempt to document the idea of what reiser4 wants to do with metafiles and why Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2004 00:09:52 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.6.1 Cc: Linux Kernel References: <41323AD8.7040103@namesys.com> <413E170F.9000204@namesys.com> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200409080009.52683.robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2059 Lines: 43 On Tuesday 07 September 2004 23.05, William Stearns wrote: > somone wrote > > "..." is pretty good, but I think it has been used by others, but I > > really forget who. I could live with "...", but I think "metas" and In MS-DOS you can do "cd ..." as a shortcut for ..\.. but only in the cd command. VMS used it with fileneme pattern matching to indicate a recursive search. > Some trojans and rootkits have used it to store files; > /usr/lib/... , /usr/doc/... , /usr/sbin/... , /usr/local/bin/... , > /dev/... , and /usr/include/... are used by bobkit. > This might trigger false positives for rootkit detection tools > like chkrootkit and rootkit-hunter. > Cheers, > - Bill Rootkit detection tools need to be updated and improved regularly anyway. If you use old rootkit detection tools, it might be a bonus if you are reminded of that fact. That's a feature, not a bug. Maybe file/./attribute then. /. on a file is currently meaningless. That does not avoid the unpleasant fact that has been brought up by others (only to be ignored), that the directory syntax does not allow metadata on directories. I'm not convinced that totally transparent access to meta-data actually benefits anyone. If metadata is that useful (which I believe) it may well be worth fixing those apps that need, and can use them. The rest should just ignore it, even loose it. There are too many apps that will not work properly with the metadata as file semantics anyway. Implementing something that only works sometimes is not a good idea. A new API would work where you expect it to work, i.e. in new and fixed apps, just like ACL's and EA's. (Ok, the ACL's are effective everywhere, but they aren't copied to new files or even preserved when editing, so emacs and others needs some fixing anyway). -- robin - 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/