David Masover writes: [...]
> > Maintainability is like optimization. The maintainability of a > non-working program is irrelevant. You'd be right if we already had > plugins-in-the-VFS. We don't. The most maintainable solution for > plugins-in-the-FS that actually exists is Reiser4, exactly as it is now > - -- because it is the _only_ one that actually exists right now. But it is not so. There _are_ plugins-in-the-VFS. VFS operates on opaque objects (inodes, dentries, file system types) through interfaces: {inode,address_space,dentry,sb,etc.}_operations. Every file system back-end if free to implement whatever number of these interfaces. And the do this already: check the sources; even ext2 does this: e.g., ext2_fast_symlink_inode_operations and ext2_symlink_inode_operations. This is exactly what upper level reiser4 plugins are for. I guess that one of Christoph Hellwig's complaints is that reiser4 introduces another layer of abstraction to implement something that already exists. Nikita.