> Things like the backup flag and the read-only flag do have analogues on
> other filesystems. There really aren't that many new flag ideas under
> the sun.... I very much doubt we'll run out in the near future, at
> least as far as flags are concerned.
Integers are useful too. NTFS has 4 time stamps. (POSIX + DOS)
If it has genuine cross-filesystem semantics, then we should add it to
the VFS layer. If the extra timestamps are too filesystem specific,
then we shouldn't, and it should be via some other mechanism, and we
should pollute the stat structure with it.
UFS has _two_ immutable flags with different properties. See the problem?
Actually, UFS's two immutable flags (immutable and append-only) exactly
correspond to the two immutable flags we have in ext2fs. That's the
whole point why we should have a unified interface. The semantics of
the flags are the same because we stole them from UFS, because they were
useful semantics. What I'm saying now is that we should use the same
interface as BSD, given that we stole the original idea from them. And
given that the immutable flag also maps very nicely to FAT's read/only
flag, we should use the same interface for setting that flag.
- Ted
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