Re: named streams, extended attributes, and posix

[Mo McKinlay]

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Today, Michael Rothwell ([e-mail]) wrote:

  > Thanks. I think having the option of the namespace augmentation would be
  > useful, in terms of supporting existing filesystems. On NTFS, ":" is not
  > a legal filename character anyway. The namespace augmentation suggested
  > in the paper would allow filesystems like NTFS to work as they should,
  > and all other filesystems to ignore it.

This was the tack I originally took - but I realised it would eventually
cause problems - not least because rather than returning an error when a
user does something not supported like most actions do, the operation
behaves differently - which is a little confusing.

(Take symbolic linking, for example - if you ln -s on VFAT, you get
'operation not permitted' - named stream/EA operations on a filesystem
that doesn't support them should return the same, IMHO).

Also, I don't like the idea of bypassing POSIX in this manner (using ':'
as a delimeter), even if the underlying filesystem *may* not support it.

What's to say that ext4 (or whatever) won't support named streams, but
still allow ':'? Your solution as it stands would break in that situation
(assuming I've not missed something :)

Mo.

- -- 
Mo McKinlay
[e-mail]
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