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Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!newshost.nla.gov.au!act.news.telstra.net!vic.news.telstra.net!news.mira.net.au!yarrina.connect.com.au!news.mel.aone.net.au!imci4!imci3!imci2!news.internetMCI.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!mail2news.alias.net!myriad!mylinuxbox!suck!netcom.com!kalessin From: Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com> Subject: Re: Ideal filesystem Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Message-ID: <315B0727.70172281@netcom.com> Sender: kalessin@netcom13.netcom.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) References: <4hptj4$cf4@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu> <3140C968.20699696@netcom.com> <4ilgto$861@floyd.sw.oz.au> <4j6if4$15gk@news.missouri.edu> <315834CD.7C4DA6C7@netcom.com> <4jc6q5$bgd@josie.abo.fi> Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 21:39:51 GMT X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.01 (X11; I; Linux 1.2.13 i486) Lines: 35 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:20216 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:16203 > if you're going to do this, go all the way and go with #3. if a file > is no longer a simple byte stream, then there is no reason why it > should have only one set of permissions (or ownerships!), nor any > reason why its subparts (EAs) shouldn't be able to have subparts of > their own. anything less would be introducing arbitrary and silly > limitations that are bound to break sooner or later. the more general > solution - like somebody posted a userfs example of Yes... I've been thinking about this quite a bit. If we throw away the directory bit, 1. how would a user interface (bash, xfilemanager, etc) know if an object (general term for the file-directory complex) is a file or a directory? What would "ls -F" look like? 2. If an object has no files inside it (in it's directory), and it's data stream length is 0, is it a file or a directory? 3. How do you specify EA's for a directory? In other words, how do you have an icon for a directory? 4. If we designate file types by <filename>/filetype, and "/usr/bin/groff/filetype" tells us "groff"'s filetype, then we can no longer have files with the name "filetype", since they would be interpreted to be indicating their parent object's file type. However, this could be solved by having all "attributes" start with a special character - like "$" or something else. 5. This will basically kill tar, cpio, and other backup utilities, since they backup either a file's contents, or the subfiles, but never both. 6. How do we "emulate" the directory bit for existing apps? -- Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com> Website ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/ka/kalessin/adam.html Linux - OS/2