On 8/17/07, ron minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 8/17/07, David Leimbach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I wonder what happened to my request for a UTF encoding for sarcasm... > > OK, you win the prize! I am a lousy troll ... > > ron >
Nah I just thought you were joking about the article because the author starts by singing the praises of the symbolic link. :-) My objections to their well established existence are based on feeling uneasy about the answers to the following questions: What happens to file metadata that you 1. Put on NFS? 2. Access with 9p? 3. Copy from one filesystem to another? 4. Copy from one OS to another? 5. Archive one one and move to another OS then extract? (smart archiver?) Somehow I don't feel like I need this feature to do anything and that any data I put in there is destined to be lost on backup and restore which is part of why I worked on xar to do extended attributes for Mac OS X... I really wanted to be able to backup Microsoft Office and have it restore and actually work, "tar" couldn't do this, "pax" couldn't do this (well at the time anyway they might now....). See for yourself, there's at least 3 implementations of extended attribute "backends" in xar. (fbsdattr, darwinattr, linuxattr) http://xar.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xar/lib/ Like em or not, they're here... and we have to deal. I just don't want to see Plan 9 adopt them because it seems possible to do everything they enable us to do by fixing file formats. Clearly I can design one format that archives them from 3 different OSes (and yeah, we used XML for that cuz everything is better with XML!!!). At any rate, it certainly increases job security for those who know about them and how to use em! :-) Dave Dave
