How about a virtual file system ? (was: Re: file attributes)

[Larry McVoy]

> All this business of file attributes and ACL could be handled in a slightly
> different manner--a Virtual File System (VFS).  

Sort of.  SunOS, at least, has a VFS layer (UFS, RFS, TMPFS, NFS, etc,
are all abide by the VFS interface).  Unfortunately, there is no
interface in the (current) VFS that allows for extended attributes.  As
far as I can tell, this thread has been wandering around mindlessly.
Add an interface that lets you add <name, value> attributes to a file
and another which allows you to query (might want a "*" name to give
back a list) and be done with it.  All the normal Unix commands will
ignore this gunk, they'll never know it is there (the exceptions are
things that try to be file systems, like tar, cpio, shar, etc).
Stuff that wants to know, can.  What's the big deal?  As far as I can
tell, the only interesting part is how you migrate the attributes around.
---
Larry McVoy		(415) 821-5758			 lm at sunburn.stanford.edu