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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!floyd.sw.oz.au!usenet 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 Lines: 78 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> NNTP-Posting-Host: suede.sw.oz.au X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 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