Re: Versioning file system

[alan <alan@clueserver.org>]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

> alan wrote:
> > On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Bodo Eggert wrote:
> >
> > > alan <alan@clueserver.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > I just wish that people would learn from the mistakes of others.  The
> > > > MacOS is a prime example of why you do not want to use a forked
> > > > filesystem, yet some people still seem to think it is a good idea.
> > > > (Forked filesystems tend to be fragile and do not play well with
> > > > non-forked filesystems.)
> > >
> > > What's the conceptual difference between forks and extended user
> > > attributes?
> >
> > Forks tend to contain more than just extended attributes.  They contain
> > all sorts of other meta-data including icons, descriptions, author
> > information, copyright data, and whatever else can be shoveled into them
> > by the author/user.
>
> And that makes them different from extended attributes, how?

The amount of crap.  Both seem to become a collection bin for "stuff we 
need to describe this object".  Forks seem to get more piled on, but they 
are effectively the same thing.

> Both of these really are nothing but ad hocky syntactic sugar for
> directories, sometimes combined with in-filesystem support for small
> data items.

And both tend to break when you go to a file system that does not support 
them.

--
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                  - Alan Cox
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