Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1764257AbXEWNYR (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 May 2007 09:24:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755780AbXEWNYC (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 May 2007 09:24:02 -0400 Received: from mail.bmlv.gv.at ([193.171.152.37]:47559 "EHLO mail.bmlv.gv.at" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755869AbXEWNYA (ORCPT ); Wed, 23 May 2007 09:24:00 -0400 From: "Ph. Marek" To: Al Viro Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] file as directory Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 15:23:54 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 Cc: Miklos Szeredi , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org, torvalds@linux-foundation.org References: <20070523113925.GT4095@ftp.linux.org.uk> In-Reply-To: <20070523113925.GT4095@ftp.linux.org.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200705231523.55306.philipp.marek@bmlv.gv.at> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1774 Lines: 45 On Mittwoch, 23. Mai 2007, Al Viro wrote: > Then I do not understand what this mechanism could be used for, other > than an odd way to twist POSIX behaviour and see how much of the userland > would survive that. I have some similar considerations about how userspace should deal with that. The behaviour of simply "cd file/" are not that robust, I fear ... > Certainly not useful for your "look into tarball > as a tree", unless you seriously want to scan the entire damn fs for > tarballs at mount time and set up a superblock for each. And for per-file > extended attributes/forks/whatever-you-call-that-abomination it also > obviously doesn't help, since you lose them for directories. Well, *use cases* I can see. I'd like to use that - for loop mounting, archives, possibly using symlinks to remote filesystems "symlink1 => ssh:user@ip" (although that's possible with FUSE anyway - but would be possibly within a .zip, too), ... But I'm not sure how to do the presentation to userspace *right*. How about some special node in eg. /proc (or a new filesystem)? Eg. /fileAsDir/etc/passwd/owner ... would work for all *files*. For directories we do not know whether we're still climbing the hierarchy or would like to see meta-data. Some way like a ".this" entry is not the Right Way IMO ... Well, I cannot imagine a real good way to tell where I'd like to stop following the "normal" filesystem and go into the "generated" hierarchy ... /fileAsDir/level-3/usr/local/bin/owner is not nice. Regards, Phil - 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/