Re: [9fans] design clairvoyance & the 9 way

[David Presotto <presotto@closedmind.org>]

Dave Mazieres had a reasonable take on the name space.  The
implementation in the kernel (chan.c) is hard to understand.
Exportfs is wierd because the namespace it exports isn't
really what it sees (a bunch of different mount points all
with their own qid space) but instead makes up a new qid
space to paper over the differences.

He wanted to make the name space even more visible, make
the file protocol recursive (i.e. able to encapsulate in
a visible way subsets of itself), and perhaps implement the
whole thing at user level.

I didn't really like his particular solution in that direction
but I believe that his observation was right.  I'm just not sure
what the fix should be or even if it wouldn't be worse than the
problem.