Re: [9front] /proc/n/fd format clarification

[ori@eigenstate.org]

Quoth binary cat <dogedoge61@gmail.com>:
> > I suspect version numbers never go up much in practice.
> 
> Sometimes they don't, but they do quite often.
> Every directory I checked had at least one file with a qid version over 9.
> /env was over 1000.
> 
>  A format that seems to have fixed width fields,
> but actually doesn't, seems like a bad idea.
> I guess it's ok for /proc/n/fd, since the first line will always be
> variable length,
> but it seems problematic for /fd/nctl.
> 
> It makes it seem like you could read data from a fixed offset instead
> of parsing the whole file,
> which will work most of the time, but will break if you open a file
> that has been edited too much.
> Imagine a script that works the first 9 times, then breaks. Not a good look.

Do you assume all integers are formatted with
exactly the required number of digits, or are
qids somehow special to you?

> What I would do is keep the qid version as decimal (for backward compatibility),
> but simply pad it enough (10 spaces) so it's fixed width, like the
> rest of the fields.
> This would mean you wouldn't have to read through the whole file to
> get the filename.
> 
> Either way, I do think the documentation should be clearer about this.

If I get a patch, I don't have objections to
applying it.