Re: [9fans] directly opening Plan9 devices

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

On Sun, 2009-01-04 at 00:27 -0500, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > > Usign #X means doing a mount (you are attaching to the root
> > > of the driver's tree).
> >
> > You're right, of course. But it feels like a very special mount
> > if one can refer to files served by the drivers directly through:
> > '#X/bla-bla'.
>
> s/driver/file server/
> there doesn't need to be any hardware involved.

Well, that's part of the problem. I can't refer to things served
by the actual 9P servers via something like /srv/sources/plan9.
/srv/sources is a channel and as such it needs to be explicitly
mounted before I can access what is being served by it. If all
I could do with #X is to bind/mount it -- it would make a much
more coherent model. From my point of view, of course.

> could you explain why you think this is special?

I have nothing (major) against bind/mount interpreting names that
start with # in a special way. I feel quite confused when namec()
does that interpretation for a variety of system calls. Things
like
   term% cd '#|'
   term% pwd
   #|
just don't seem right.

But let me ask you this in return: do you feel that constraining #X to
bind/mount only would, actually, be worse compared to the behavior
we have today?

Thanks,
Roman.