linux-kernel - Re: "Why Reuser 4 still is not in" doc

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Date:	Mon, 17 Jul 2006 17:38:11 +0100
From:	Lexington Luthor <Lexington.Luthor@...il.com>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject:  Re: "Why Reuser 4 still is not in" doc

Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> Yes, it changes the semantics. Suddenly you can "cd linux-2.6.17.tar.bz2". 
> But what will stat() return? S_IFDIR? S_IFREG? S_IFANY? A .tar parser in 
> kernelspace is almost never the right thing. And then a cpio parser, 
> because that's what initramfs'es are made of. Not to forget .zip, because 
> that's omnipresent. Oh of course we'd also need bzip2 and gzip decoder. 
> BASE64 and UU anyone?

Is there any particular reason that the parsers need to be in 
kernel-space. The reiser4 plugins seem like an ideal counterpart to 
FUSE. Imagine being able to automatically FUSE-mount a tar file as a 
filesystem when you cd into it. stat() need not return S_IFDIR since 
everything is a directory anyway (only normal directories need S_IFDIR, 
just like currently). When you cd into a tar file, a FUSE-fs kicks in 
and provides access to the tar file as a normal filesystem inside it - 
from userspace.

> I wish you a lot of fun with users in LDAP or other exotic storage methods.
> By making Everything possible through echo, you are violating the unix 
> philosophy that one tool should do one thing (though echo does just that). 
> And in this case, echo would be chown, chmod, tar, bzip2 all at once. This 
> sounds familiar, I think I have seen this with explorer.exe (and its 
> uncountable DLLs), which lets you change everything within the same 
> window.

And why can meta-data not be accessed as files? To me, a lowly userspace 
developer, it seems even more inline with the UNIX way of things. bzip2 
can be in userspace while still providing data to kernel space via a 
FUSE-like interface.

Regards,
LL

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