Re: Implementing Meta File information in Linux (resent after bounce

Matthew Hannigan (mha73@qantas.com.au)
Mon, 05 Oct 1998 15:33:16 +1000


Hans Reiser <reiser@idiom.com> wrote
> inheritance, I m ean that you can specify an attribute parent, and
> when one wants to know what the value of any attribute not present
> in the object is, one looks at the parent.

I can see how this might save a lot of time/space with permissions; if
the permissions set was inherited in such a fashion, then the
permissions of whole heirarchies of files could be specified
entirely with just a few bits in the top most node. With the only
distinction being between files and directories because directories
would be drwx... by default. Or, if you internally inherited the
'umask' rather than the permissions you could treat dirs and files
similarly.

Only trouble with this might be that the naive user doing chmod's
might be be surprised to find it takes a lot longer to chmod a
single dir, as the fs runs down the tree un-inheriting from this
particular dir to preserve the Unix fs behaviour. OTOH, chmod -R
would scream if the chmod syscall could see the -R.

> [ .. ] There are many variations on
> this that I don't want to get into the relative merits of until I
> am ready to code (not this year).

Oh :-)

--
	Matt Hannigan
	mlh@zip.com.au

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