Hi, while hunting yet another bug in the octopus, I´ve been thinking that one problem that we have in general, in Plan 9, is that there are files that behave like files, and files that do not.
For example, append only files do not, offsets are ignored on writes. ctl files are not, either. You write a ctl string, and reading the file reports something else. Clone files are different files, each time they are open. This is a problem when (like we do in the octopus) you try to cache files. But it´s also a problem for things like tar and to whoever tries to use the file as a plain one. Why don´t add a QTCTL bit to Qid.type? It would mean "this file does not behave like a regular file, do not cache and handle with care). I think the change can be incorporated without causing a nightmare and it would make things more clean, regarding what can one expect from a file after looking at its directory entry.
