Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:47:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: alan <alan@clueserver.org>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
cc: Bodo Eggert <7eggert@gmx.de>, Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu>,
       =?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=F6rn_Engel?= <joern@logfs.org>,
       Jack Stone <jack@hawkeye.stone.uk.eu.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, akpm@linux-foundation.org,
       viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk
Subject: Re: Versioning file system
In-Reply-To: <4676F9A2.6010007@zytor.com>
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On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> alan wrote:
>> On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Bodo Eggert wrote:
>>
>>> alan <alan@clueserver.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I just wish that people would learn from the mistakes of others.  The
>>>> MacOS is a prime example of why you do not want to use a forked
>>>> filesystem, yet some people still seem to think it is a good idea.
>>>> (Forked filesystems tend to be fragile and do not play well with
>>>> non-forked filesystems.)
>>>
>>> What's the conceptual difference between forks and extended user
>>> attributes?
>>
>> Forks tend to contain more than just extended attributes.  They contain
>> all sorts of other meta-data including icons, descriptions, author
>> information, copyright data, and whatever else can be shoveled into them
>> by the author/user.
>
> And that makes them different from extended attributes, how?

The amount of crap.  Both seem to become a collection bin for "stuff we 
need to describe this object".  Forks seem to get more piled on, but they 
are effectively the same thing.

> Both of these really are nothing but ad hocky syntactic sugar for
> directories, sometimes combined with in-filesystem support for small
> data items.

And both tend to break when you go to a file system that does not support 
them.

-- 
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                   - Alan Cox
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