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From: Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Ideal filesystem
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Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 21:52:48 GMT
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Andrew Reilly wrote:
>
> Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com> wrote:
> >That's exactly what EA's are - the data is stored as a stream on the
> >disk, but the application sees it as a miniature filesystem - a
> >hierarchy.
>
> And so the question has to be asked: "What's wrong with the filesystem
> hierarchy we have at the moment?" (See my previous post on the Acorn
> RISC-OS solution to the resource fork problem.)
Except that RISC-OS can't attach attributes to binary files that aren't applications (i.e., word
processor files, pixmaps, etc) an EA structure would be able to. BTW, we could implement EA's by
like thus: If you made a call to the kernel requesting to open the following file
/usr/bin/groff//filetype
the kernel would return to you a stream containing the "filetype" EA on the file
"/usr/bin/groff". In other words, let's keep the existing file access commands - just extend the
syntax of a pathname to include EA's using "//" or some other character. Just think of what we
could do with symlinks in EAs!!!
> If you go introducing resource
> forks or whatever, then you'll need something other than "tar" to do
> backups and file transfers.
Tar works just dandy in OS/2, and it saves all the EA's. I believe Tar has extra space allocated
in the file format for ACL's (Access Control Lists) that is *really* just a space for OS-specific
inode crap.
- Adam
--
Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Website ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ka/kalessin/adam.html
Linux - OS/2