Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@...>, Hans Reiser <reiser@...>, <linux-fsdevel@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, Alexander Lyamin aka FLX <flx@...>, ReiserFS List <reiserfs-list@...>
Heh. I don't think that's a very strong argument against being "unixy",
considering how traditional unix _used_ to handle directories.
mkdir/rmdir/rename only came later. Now, obviously they did come later for
a good reason, but still..
The interesting part is that thanks to the dcache, we should be perfectly
able to actually _see_ circular links etc, so some of the problems with
linking directories should actually be quite solvable - something that is
_not_ true for a traditional UNIX VFS layer.
Of course, the dcache introduces some new problems of its own wrt
directory aliasing, but I don't actually think that should be fundamental
either. Treating them more as a "static mountpoint" from an FS angle and
less as a traditional Unix hardlink should be doable, I'd have thought.
(Also, it's entirely possible that the filesystem may not support some of
the more esoteric linking/renaming operations. For example, in a
traditional xattrs setup where the xattr is linked on-disk with the file
it is associated with, you simply _can't_ link it somewhere else, or
rename it to any other directory. That's not a VFS layer issue, obviously,
but I thought I'd bring up the point that file-as-dir cases may have
limitations that normal files don't have).
Now that's a separate argument, and not one I'm personally interested in
arguing at least right now. I haven't actually looked at the reiser4 code,
so I'm really _only_ arguing against special-case attributes.
Linus
