>Sounds reasonable. The thing with "reservation" is that people use >it in daily life with all kinds of meanings,
That's the way it is all over. Normal people are very sloppy in their language. Engineers have to try to narrow the meanings of the common words to avoid totally confusing each other in these complex discussions. But I think "reserve" in common usage is a lot less ambiguous than you say. I believe when you reserve a seat on an airplane, most of the time it isn't a particular seat. When it is, the airline will call it a "seat assignment" and you get it only after you turn your reservation into a purchased ticket. I've never worked in a restaurant, but I've always assumed that when I make a reservation, even the restaurant doesn't know which table it is until I show up. That way, it can load balance and give people choices when they come in. >E.g. if we "reserve" the next hundred blocks, so that allocation is >contiguous, we may want to be able to take them away if some other >file needs them. I would not call that a reservation. I did, incidentally, design such a system once, and I called it "pencilled in." I might also call it preliminary placement. But I agree that reservations can be more or less firm, owing to the fact that sometimes they can be broken, with more or less ease. E.g. you might reserve a megabyte of space for a file, and under pathological conditions still be told when you go to write that there's no space for you and you're screwed. Just like you can get to the restaurant and be told there's no table for you. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
