On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Michael Rothwell wrote:
>
> While I'm not neccissarily an "NTFS person," I feel
> compelled to point out that NTFS named streams operate
> as normal files, and are accessed via a namespace
> extension, the ":" character. BeFS, HPFS, etc. Extended
> Attributes can be built on top of NTFS-style Named
> Streams by providing accessor functions that simply
> opening a stream, writing a chunk of data to it, and
> closing it again.
Ahh. Ok, then I confused it with the BeFS people.
Or the XFS people.
Anyway, somebody. Somebody was suggesting the utterly limited and
braindead interface of "set_extended_attribute(file, xxxx, yyy, zzzz)"
kind of approach. Which obviously does not handle the generic case.
And I agree with you: I think the only sane _design_ is one that can
handle the generic case.
"Give them rope", as Joan of Arc used to say.
That was the reason UNIX originally did everything as a "stream of bytes".
Because in the end, anything else is too limiting.
Make the extended attributes look like regular files. Then, of course, the
actual low-level implementation may not be able to do everything. Size
limitations etc are a fact of life too. Special naming conventions. All
things we've had to be able to handle since day 1.
Linus
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