On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 01:24:36PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
quoted text
> 
> 
> On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > 
> > Over the last at least five years we've taken as much as possible
> > semantics out of the filesystems and into the VFS layer, thus having
> > a separation between the semantical layer (VFS) and the low level
> > filesystem.  Your attributes are absoultely a VFS thing and as such
> > should not happen at the filesystem layer, and no, that doesn't mean
> > they're bad per se, I just think they are a rather bad fit for Linux.
> 
> Now this I agree with, in the sense that I think that if we want to 
> support this, it should be supported at a VFS layer. 

ACK.  However, I'm still not seeing *ANYTHING* that would look like a workable
scheme in presense of hardlinks.  Show me how to make that deadlock- and
race-free and we might very well do it in VFS.

_That_ is what's missing and it's needed no matter where it's implemented.
You want hybrid objects - you want to solve that one.  So far I've seen
nothing workable.