On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 04:38:48PM +0100, Peter Foldiak wrote: > On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 16:14, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On Tue, 10 May 2005 10:39:23 BST, Peter Foldiak said: > > > Back in November 2004, I suggested on the linux-kernel and reiserfs > > > lists that the Reiser4 architecture could allow us to abolish the > > > unnatural naming distinction between directories/files/parts-of-file > > > (i.e. to unify naming within-file-system and within-file naming) in an > > > efficient way. > > > I suggested that one way of doing that would be to extend XPath-like > > > selection syntax above the (XML) file level. > > > > I believe the consensus was that this needs to happen at the VFS layer, not > > the FS level. The next step would be designing an API for this - what would > > the VFS present to userspace, and in what way, and how would backward > > combatability be maintained? > > But can it be done efficiently above the file system level?? > Anything that can be done at the fs level should be doable on the vfs level too. That is simple to show in theory: You could make the VFS api identical to the reiser4 api, and reiser4 should continue to work as efficiently as before.
> As far as I understand, Reiser4 has this nice tree structure, which > means that the part of file selection could be done with almost no extra > effort, you just attach additional names to inside nodes of the tree, so > the same tree can be used to store the whole object, and part of the > same tree can be used to select the object part. Right? > If you do this above the file system level, I don't think it would have > such an efficient implementation. Or would it? Peter I cannot see why reiser4 should suffer - but of course this might be hard to implement for other filesystems. Helge Hafting
