Darren New wrote:
Ralph Shumaker wrote:
I know little about this topic, very little, but I thought you were
the one nitpicking (in reverse) when you glossed over his statement
that pipes are not merely different filesystems.
No. I'm pointing out that "the arrangement of blocks on a disk" is not
what makes a file system. Why is the pipe system not a file system?
How about FIFOs? How about unix-domain sockets? Are those file
systems, or parts thereof? How about sockets, or Ameoba's file
servers, or NFS? What about Eros, where all files are stored in memory?
I am overwhelmed by your knowledge of the subject. Suffice it to say, I
think his point was simply that pipes and what is normally thought of as
a filing system are very different beasts, even though they have in
common many parts. I am not a monkey or an elephant or a prairie dog.
We each have lungs, a heart, a brain, a cardio-vascular system, muscles,
reproductive organs, and so on. But we are each very different critters.
To claim there's a hard and fast cut-off between some of those and
others of those is, I think, erroneous. Certainly you can make a
definition that says "these are file systems, those aren't", but such
a distinction is artificial, and inappropriate to the discussion at hand.
Of the critters I mentioned above, there's a pretty "hard and fast
cut-off" in some ways, and not at all erroneous.
The definition of an elephant precludes me from being one. The
definition of a mammal includes me along with each of the other critters
I mentioned. Vertebrates include even more. Yes, definitions *are*
artificial, but that does not make them useless.
As for a distinctive definition being "inappropriate to the discussion
at hand", I'll have to take your word for it. I don't know enough about it.
And I think you still did not notice the actual wordage he used. (I
don't remember who it was and you snipped that part out.) He did not
say that pipes are not filesystems. He said ~"... pipes are not
*merely* different filesystems ..."~ (emphasis added). Your response
made it seem like you totally missed the words "merely different".
This is not an attack. This is just how it looked to me.
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
