On Sat, 2009-01-03 at 23:01 -0800, Russ Cox wrote: > On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:12 PM, Roman V. Shaposhnik <r...@sun.com> wrote: > > [complaint about # names]
Please let me know what kind of keywords or emoticons I am supposed to include in my emails to indicate that they are *not* complaints, but rather invitations for a discussion. > No one has yet offered a working, cleaner idea. Not to even suggest a 100% cleanliness, but simply as a matter of incremental improvements here's one simple idea. Wouldn't the approach of treating #X as channels instead of full fledged parallel namespace be at least somewhat cleaner than what we have today? If the only thing that any of the "#X" permitted was to issue a mount/bind syscall, it would, IMHO, simplify and clean at least the following areas: 1.1. the need for less than ideal special case in namec(): switch(name[0]){ case '#': Not that we would get rid of it 100%, but it seems much more appropriate in bindmount() 1.2. the need for an implicit and poorly documented and thus confusing ->attach in namec(): switch(name[0]){ case '#': ..... c = devtab[t]->attach(up->genbuf+n); 1.3. an ability of userspace applications to bypass the venerable namespace mechanics The above seems like a net gain, doesn't it? Thanks, Roman.