*BSD News Article 63824


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From: Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Ideal filesystem
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Mats Andtbacka wrote:
> 
> Adam Megacz, in <314A470D.CCE53F0@netcom.com>:
> [...]
> >  - MOST OF ALL, FILE TYPE! The standard UNIX mechanism for determining
> >file type is *almost* as crappy as WinDoze's (filename extensions). This
> >is one of the few areas where the Mac & OS/2 kick Linux's butt.
> 
> this is only useful if you want your files to be typed at all. the
> "unix way" has traditionally been that files are all of one type,
> streams of bytes, and what's in them should only matter to the
> applications. this model may or may not be a "good" one, but breaking
> it should not be done lightly; introducing such a fundamental
> incompatibility with the rest of the Unix world is not a trivial
> thing.

Until Minix/Linux came along, the UNIX way was to charge a lot of money
for a system and not release source code. I refuse to let "the Unix way"
interfere with the future of operating systems. If you have any logical
reasons (aside from the "gut feeling" mentioned above), I'd be glad to
hear them.

> >They reside in the inode,
> not if you want a fixed-size inode they don't. (i'm under the
> impression that at least ext2, and probably FFS, use fixed-size
> one-block inodes; do correct me if i'm mistaken.)

HPFS has fixed inode sizes, stores EA's in the inode, and it is the best
implementation of EA's to date.

-- 
Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Website ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ka/kalessin/adam.html
Linux - OS/2