Re: reiser4 plugins

[Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca>]

On Fri, 01 Jul 2005 03:41:00 -0400, Chet Hosey <chosey@nauticom.net> said:

> Horst von Brand wrote:
>> And who says that a normal user isn't allowed to annotate each and
>> every file with its purpose or something else?

Explain how you currently allow users to annotate arbitrary files.

>> I can very well imagine a system in which users (say students in a
>> Linux class) want to do so... on a shared machine. Or users having a
>> shared MP3 or photograph or ... collection, with individual notes on
>> each. Or even developers wanting to annotate source code files with
>> their comments, but leave them read-only (or have them under SCM).

> This same argument could be used to attack the idea of group
> permissions -- that groups of users might have conflicting
> goals. Implementing metadata in userspace via bundled files has the
> same drawback.

The situation is even better with file-as-dir.  If the administrator
wants to allow users to edit the description metadata for the file foo,
the administrator can set the appropriate permissions for
foo/.../description, and keep foo read-only.

>>Kevin Bowen <kevin@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>>> If you're sysadmining a multiuser reiser4 box, and your users are
>>> able to modify the metadata of files they don't own, then you go to
>>> sysadmin purgatory.

Actually, you could use something like unionfs to allow users to keep
their own annotations without affecting everyone else's.

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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