Re: [9fans] everything is a directory

["David Leimbach" <leimy2k@gmail.com>]

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On 8/17/07, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 8/17/07, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I wonder what happened to my request for a UTF encoding for sarcasm...
>
> OK, you win the prize! I am a lousy troll ...
>
> ron
>

Nah I just thought you were joking about the article because the author
starts by singing the praises of the symbolic link.  :-)

My objections to their well established existence are based on feeling
uneasy about the answers to the following questions:

What happens to file metadata that you
1. Put on NFS?
2. Access with 9p?
3. Copy from one filesystem to another?
4. Copy from one OS to another?
5. Archive one one and move to another OS then extract? (smart archiver?)

Somehow I don't feel like I need this feature to do anything and that any
data I put in there is destined to be lost on backup and restore which is
part of why I worked on xar to do extended attributes for Mac OS X... I
really wanted to be able to backup Microsoft Office and have it restore and
actually work, "tar" couldn't do this, "pax" couldn't do this (well at the
time anyway they might now....).

See for yourself, there's at least 3 implementations of extended attribute
"backends" in xar.

(fbsdattr, darwinattr, linuxattr)
http://xar.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xar/lib/


Like em or not, they're here... and we have to deal.  I just don't want to
see Plan 9 adopt them because it seems possible to do everything they enable
us to do by fixing file formats.  Clearly I can design one format that
archives them from 3 different OSes (and yeah, we used XML for that cuz
everything is better with XML!!!).

At any rate, it certainly increases job security for those who know about
them and how to use em! :-)

Dave






Dave

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