Re: reiser4 plugins

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Hubert Chan wrote:
On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 08:29:56 +0200, David Weinehall <[email protected]> said:


On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 12:33:10AM -0400, Hubert Chan wrote:

It's sort of like the way web servers handle index.html, for those
who think it's a stupid idea.  (Of course, some people may still
think it's a stupid idea... ;-) )


And guess what?  That's handled on the web server level (userland),
not by the file system.  So different web servers can handle it
differently (think index.html.sv, index.html.zh, index.php, etc).


From the web *browser*'s point of view, it is handled by the
"filesystem" (which is provided by the various servers).  The browser
doesn't care how or where the data is stored.  It just requests a file,
and gets some data back.  So the browser doesn't have to check for
http://www.example.com/, get a failure (trying to read a directory),
check for http://www.example.com/index.html, etc.  In this way, the web
server controls (which I think takes the place of the filesystem in this
case) what gets shown (index.html.sv, etc.), instead of the leaving it
up to the browser.

Somewhat flawed analogy, though. After the protocol definition, the browser proper will take any URL that the protocol handler likes, which is why file:// works. After the domain, the http/https handler will take any URL at all, except for maybe some character set issues. So assuming the server is compatible with itself, we don't have to worry about whether the browser supports going to a directory and having it behave as a file (index.html behavior), or going to a file and having it behave as a directory (as some scripts do -- I've seen urls that look like http://example.com/foo.cgi/bar.html)

Among protocols that behave more like filesystems, such as FTP, you can't really pull the same tricks. When an FTP client asks for a directory, it's probably asking for a directory listing, and would be quite surprised to find a file there -- or the user would when binary data floods their terminal.

I *think* this is how FTP works, but I haven't used it in years, except through a web browser. I still get the feeling that even a web browser expects an FTP file to behave as a file and an FTP directory to behave as a directory.

But I'm also pretty sure that FTP would be much more receptive to file-as-directory than your average sysadmin would. For one, breaking tar is unforgivable, and the only ways I can think of fixing that issue are shaky at best when you consider how many apps might do things oh-so-slightly different than tar.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

[Index of Archives]     [Kernel Newbies]     [Netfilter]     [Bugtraq]     [Photo]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [MIPS Linux]     [ARM Linux]     [Linux Security]     [Linux RAID]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Linux for the blind]
  Powered by Linux