Semantic Changes with Reiser4
“As expected, merging Resier4 into Andrew Morton’s -mm tree
brought with it a lot of additional features and semantic changes.
Christoph Hellwig expressed some unhappiness over these semantic
changes, spawning a lengthy thread on the lkml. Specifically, he
mentioned that the handling of files-as-directories (multiple
streams within files) could cause problems to user-space
applications, and could cause other dcache problems.“A lot of opposition was expressed. Some mentioned that the
handling of multiple streams is really a userspace issue, whereas
others mentioned that legacy applications may not properly handle
multiple streams which could lead to the loss of user data…”
Merging Reiser4, How and Why?
“Reading through the lengthy debate on the lkml titled ‘silent
semantic changes with reiser4’ is a time investment. Comprised of
well over 500 emails and growing, I include here a tiny snippet
containing a discussion primarily between Hans Reiser, Andrew
Morton, and Linus Torvalds…”