Hello! Something I just saw...
On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 01:56:50PM -0500, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > Take for example a tar.gz file object. You can look at it as a binary > file. But you can also look at it as an archive, which provides many > files in a directory structure. In this case, the tar.gz object itself > is the root directory of the archive. > > [...] > > Now, the problem that now occurs is that a user of the object needs to > make a decision about which facet of the object it wants to consider. > This question is simple to answer if the user only knows one of the > supported facets. For example, a program that only knows about Files > will treat all "DirFiles" in the Hurd as Files. A program that only > knows about Directories will treat all "DirFiles" as Directories. > > However, it happens that in Unix, Directories and Files are not only > very distinct objects, but they are also understand by a wide range of > applications simultaneously. Ie, many applications look at a node in > the filesystem, decide if it is a file _or_ a directory, and then take > an appropriate action. All applications that can traverse a filesystem > belong into this group, for example ls, rm, grep, find, etc. This is > the most prominent group, but I would expect there to be isolated cases > of other applications that do this (maybe Apache? Input welcome here). > > These applications face a problem in the Hurd: They will see objects > that look like Directories _and_ like Files. This causes erratic > behaviour. For example, "grep *" will search through the binary content > of directories (because it treats them as files). One suggestion was > that we add extra options to such programs to control how hybrid types > should be treated by the application. The Linux and FreeBSD FUSE (File system in USErspace) intend to implement the same ``feature'': <URL:http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2006-04.php> #v+ [...] What's on your project wish list? Miklos: Maybe the most interesting feature would be allowing hybrid objects -- for example, a file viewed as a directory. Not strictly FUSE-dependent, this has been discussed many times on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. [...] #v- Regards, Thomas _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
