*BSD News Article 64776


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From: jeremy@suede.sw.oz.au (Jeremy Fitzhardinge)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Ideal filesystem
Date: 22 Mar 1996 00:54:54 GMT
Organization: Softway Pty Ltd
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Message-ID: <4istou$ri9@floyd.sw.oz.au>
References: <4hptj4$cf4@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu> <3140C968.20699696@netcom.com>
  <4ia7im$i4m@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <314A470D.CCE53F0@netcom.com>
  <yw03f73fn8v.fsf@laurel.trs.ntc.nokia.com> <3150DCF5.FB40BBD@netcom.com>
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In-Reply-To: <3150DCF5.FB40BBD@netcom.com>
To: Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com>
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:20450 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:16432

In article <3150DCF5.FB40BBD@netcom.com>,
	Adam Megacz <kalessin@netcom.com> writes:
>> Besides, I doubt a novice finds anything which is not shown by ls. A
>> real novice has enough trouble to understand files and directories,
>> let alone extended attributes.
>UNIX wasn't made for novices. Besides, you can just tell them to type
>   purpose <filename>
>to print out the "purpose" EA of a file.

What's wrong with "cat file/purpose"? (What's the encoding of the
purpose "EA"?  cat file/purpose/encoding)

>> How to cope with foreign information?
>Foriegn languages? I dunno. I only speak English and Spanish, but I'm
>sure there's a workaround for other character sets like Russian.

If you had a file type, you'd also want an encoding (ISO 6466, Unicode,
ASCII, etc).  Encoding is more generally useful too: you'd probably
express things like compression and encryption as stacks of encodings
rather than file types (more precisely, a file can only have one type,
but may represent a number of encoding layers).

>> What parts of
>> this information would you like to have copied with cp?
>All of it.

Meaning that "cp" on a multistream file is basically the same as
cp -r.

>>  What should
>> tar, cpio etc. store with the file?
>All of the EA's. Tar's file format already has space reserved for EA's.

It doesn't really.  I guess someone hacked in some way of representing
them for OS/2.  As far as tar is concerned, you could just represent them
as a file (as opposed to a directory) with subdirectories.  This would
allow you to go to any depth (and allow an "EA" to be a directory).

>> What about NFS and other network
>> file system users? Should some parts of this information be privileged
>> and other publicly available?
>The file permissions would apply to EA's as well. It's an all-or-nothing
>deal.

Nah, you should treat "EAs" as files in their own right, with their
own permissions.  Then you can use them for annotation on a file, where
the annotations can have a more restricted audience than the file
itself.

>> Naming standards to avoid attribute name
>> space problems?
>Yep.

Well, the important thing is "NO NEW SYNTAX".  Whatever happens, you
should NOT introduce some dinky new character for getting at EAs.
I want to be able do things like:
	cat */type | grep image/gif
to find all GIF files.

>> Information format? Big endian, little endian, etc.
>Probably whatever endian is used by other UNIX file formats (tar, xbm,
>xpm, gzip, etc)

Eh?  The content of EAs is up to the user; they're just recepticles.
Generally, the most useful contents are text (like tar, xbm/xpm etc).

>Nah. Actually I'm considering a previous posting about eliminating the
>difference between files and directories - and making all files
>directories that can be read as streams. This kinda fits the UNIX
>mindset better.

Absolutely.  Is there any reason an "EA" can't have "EAs" itself?
Any reason an "EA" can't be a directory?

Keep things general and clean; OS2 EAs don't seem to be.

	J