Re: symlink_prefix

[Alexander Viro]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2001 [e-mail] wrote:

> > Current interface had grown an impressive collection of warts.
> > Worse yet, you _can't_ put parsing into generic code.
> > There are filesystems that have a binary object as 'data'.
> 
> Yes, that was a very unfortunate decision, back in the good old times
> when nfs was implemented. And smb, ncp, coda followed nfs.
> 
> Nevertheless, there is no problem adding vfs_parse_mount_options().
> For example, one can have a flag FS_HAS_BINARY_MOUNT_DATA in
> the fs_flags field of the struct file_system_type that describes
> the filesystem type, and refrain from trying to parse the mount data
> when this bit is set.

We can kludge around anything. The question being, what for? It still
leaves ncp with its ioctls ugliness. It still treats device name
in a special way for no good reason - it _is_ an option, just like any
other. Hell, less generic than nosuid or read-only. It still leaves us
with cruft in flags. What for? To maintain binary compatibility with
one utility? We can leave the old interface in place and freeze it.