Re: [Sheflug] listing sizes of directories..

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] id-pro.co.uk>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:
>     Al> The point is, "filesystem" might need to be redefined if the
>     Al> semantics become meaningless, or half-meaningless at best.
> 
> This isn't going to happen.  Files are still going strong on all
> systems I know of!

JavaSpaces, anyone? I guess this comes back to the OO system stuff..
last I read, Reiser was heading somewhat that way also...

>     Al> I'm not convinced a virtual filesystem necessarily shares
>     Al> 'time-stamps' in the same manner a physical filesystem,
>     Al> especially if it is an informational system, such as proc, or
> 
> Well, I think you'd be surprised at how useful it could be if the
> implementors only had the imagination to put it in.
> 
> Eg, personally, I think it would be a good idea if stuff like
> /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward reflected the last time they were set.
> Sure, a lot of the stuff in /proc/1 (etc) will be up to the jiffy, but
> other stuff is not.  For example, the creation time for /proc/1234
> should reflect the time the process was created.  I'm not sure what
> modification and access times should reflect, but I can imagine useful
> applications (eg, some way of determining how long the process has
> been sleeping/waiting on IO or whatever).

Agreed, sort of. This requires some sort of a priori knowledge of what
these values represent; i.e. they're not obvious and could mean a number
of different things... 

>     Al> representing some other such non-file-but-data-all-the-same
>     Al> objects..
> 
> Please call it something else if you want to change the semantics.
> That's all I'm saying.

Oh sure, I agree with that. But it probably wouldn't happen - people
aren't going to stop using 'files' ;))

>     Al> All I was saying was, it can go on if it wants, just do it
>     Al> behind my back ;) Not a philosophy I expect you to share ;)
> 
> No, I don't.  These bugs carry knives ... no way I'm turning my back
> on them!

Heh ;) 

-- 
Alex Hudson <hudson [at] ID-PRO.co.uk> * Open Source I.T. 
* ID-PRO UK Ltd. * 1 Benjamin Street * London EC1M 5QG 
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