On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 12, 2000 at 11:46:08PM -0400, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Mo McKinlay wrote:
>
> > Being able to do..
> >
> > $ cp files.tar.gz/docs/mydoc1.txt .
> >
> > Would be useful.
>
> Here it comes...
>
> But the is a perfect exampe of something that can already be done
> today in userland -- in this inctance making cp aware of tar.gz files
> and their internals. Obviously you might want to do this in an
> external library or something which reads common configuration files
> and then load handlers based of file extension or something...
Ok. Let's focus a bit.
Resource forks. HFS. NTFS. Real filesystems. Stuff that cannot sanely be
done in user space.
The "tarfs" thing is a complete red herring. It _can_ sanely be done in
user space. That's how it's been done for the last 30 years.
Let's focus on a thing that _does_ need kernel support, namely good
support for real filesystems that have aspects that are almost, but not
quite, totally unlike "tarfs".
Ok?
"tarfs" is a cool weekend hack. Not very useful, and with obvious
downsides to it. HFS and NTFS support are obviously useful things where I
don't think anybody really claims that we shouldn't natively support
getting the real data out of files mounted on such a partition.
Linus
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