From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <5d375e920709020600h7d593fbaj9cd456d1f6403949@mail.gmail.com> Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 15:00:40 +0200 From: Uriel To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: everything is a directory In-Reply-To: <7871fcf50709011811u19834b47qdc8ac9da989c3dd6@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <1188420539.242208.221640@z24g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <3e1162e60708300618k172a323ds155d38909560373c@mail.gmail.com> <46D7360E.A05C1C2E@null.net> <7871fcf50708311104p1f31796cxd4438115b35e60dd@mail.gmail.com> <5d375e920709010507u605a0700h331a32934969abb8@mail.gmail.com> <7871fcf50709011811u19834b47qdc8ac9da989c3dd6@mail.gmail.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: b43cbf1a-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 9/2/07, Joel C. Salomon wrote: > On 9/1/07, Uriel wrote: > > With this way of thinking we will never catch up with lunix's 400 > > syscalls (and counting, not to mention the ioctls)! > > We're partly there in spirit; what fraction of the 4e kernel's system > calls are there for backwards compatibility? ;) > > Back on topic, I wasn't proposing a readdir() syscall but pointing out > that Douglas's suggestion would not in fact be painless or transparent > under Plan 9. Indeed, and I would say that is a feature, not a bug. (Adding an extra syscall to read dirs would be a bug). But maybe my sarcasm got lost along the way. And actually, I think one could have something similar to Douglas suggestion in Plan 9 without changing the kernel or the vfs, or even the file servers, just have a stackable file server which for every original file /foo.txt allows you to access a /foo.txt@extendedjunk/ dir where all the extended attributes or whatever can live, that would even keep backwards compatibility with all existing tools (tools that don't know about @extendedjunk/ dirs would not even see them unless they explicitly walk to them, so you could use cd /foo.txt@extenedjunk/, followed of ls and cat to inspect the attributes, but if you do cat /* or ls / you would get a sensible output. Anyway, I still think it would be a waste of time, but like unix in its day, plan9 makes adding new 'features' rather easy, whatever they are worthy or another symlink-hell awaiting to happen is another question. Best wishes uriel P.S.: The Plan 9 industry is not creating enough jobs, we need more syscalls! And dynamic linking!