Date: Fri, 02 May 1997 18:19:23 +1200 From: physmsa AT cantua DOT canterbury DOT ac DOT nz (Mr M S Aitchison) Subject: Re: A few FS notions To: jamesl AT albany DOT net, opendos AT delorie DOT com Message-id: <199705020619.SAA19407@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> Precedence: bulk > From jamesl AT mail DOT albany DOT net Fri May 2 18:03:28 1997 >> ...allow (say) a Macintosh file system to be mounted in one > > place in the tree, an hpfs one in another.. > Wouldn't it be possible to use a single fs that has the majority of > the necessary capabilities, such as ext2, for example, and allow the > OS to handle translations to/from? (for the hard disk, that is) Well: 1. Sometimes you get filesystems from a variety of sources (remote mounts, removeable media, partitons on a system that boots a different O/S at times). 2. It is sometimes good to have a different type of filesystem for different jobs, e.g. storing long-term infrequently-used data. 3. The important need is to have attributes added as they are appropriate (anybody seen what happens when you use OS/2 on a FAT partition - the extended attributes file is huge!). If you can extend the attributes - just of the systems that want them, and preferrably just on files that need them - then it might be okay having a single filesystem type in many situations. The point I was trying to make there was that if you can have all these attributes, what happens when they are supplied by different systems (or over different networks that fail to pass some attributes), and you have to mesh them together somehow? P.S. I *do* like ext2fs, and I would like to see something better and leaner that does just about everything an average DOS user needs so they don't need others other than because they have to mount existing systems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Aitchison, Physics & Astronomy \_ Phone : +64 3 3642-947 a.h. 3371-225 University of Canterbury, (/' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------