Re: [Sheflug] listing sizes of directories..

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Al" == Alex Hudson <hudson [at] id-pro.co.uk> writes:

    Al> Broke in terms of what? Size? Looks okay to me.... datestamp,
    Al> well, maybe.

No.  The datestamp is wrong, and mounted filesystems should be rooted
in directories.  The number of links shown is anomolous, too.  I
wouldn't be surprised if a chown failed, since root.root = 0.0, a very
popular value in that listing.  What happens if you cd there?  Can you
find your way back?  <shudder>

    Al> Linus was right about what? devfs?

Yes.  Put it back in the oven, please, and cook until the puddle in
the middle turns to cake.

    Al> I'm not really sure what the semantics ought to be for a
    Al> virtual filesystem. Copying the behaviour as if it were 'real'
    Al> would be nice, but strange. It's kind of more like an atom in
    Al> a quantum state - you don't know what's there until you read
    Al> it ;)

The point of having a virtual filesystem is that it should have
filesystem semantics so that you can use fileutils on it.  You're
precisely right about the size, but the size of a filesystem object is
somewhat ill-defined even on a physical hard drive -- what is the size
of a sparse file? the size of a file on an automatically compressed
file system? is it the resources used, or the amount of data that can
be read before EOF?  The other things in a directory listing have
well-defined semantics.

If you want other semantics, fine, but don't call it a filesystem
then.  What's wrong with COM0:, D:, and ETH0:, anyway?  ;-)

    Al> I don't see why /usr is such a terrible example.... ?

Because it's a typical "small" directory and thus doesn't have a
different size from most other directories.


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