On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Kevin Ballard wrote: > > I just don't understand why you insist that the filename is data, when it is > clearly metadata. Uhh. And exactly how do you know the difference, and why should it matter? A lot of data is metadata. Look at the git index file. It's *all* metadata. Does that mean that the OS has the right to corrupt it? IOW, why do you seem to argue that metadata something you can corrupt, but not then "regular" data? Why is it ok to change a filename, when that same filename may *also* be encoded by the user in a regular data file (think about MD5SUM files, for example, that include the pathname, but now the pathname is part of the file data, not on a filesystem). So filenames are data, they're metadata, they're whatever. None of that means that it's acceptable to corrupt them, or gives the OS any reason to say that it "knows better" than the user in how users use them. It's still the *users* metadata, not the filesystems own metadata! In many cases, users use filenames *as* data, ie the filename actually has a meaning in itself, not just as a handle to get the file contents. If this was truly metadata that isn't visible to the user, and not under the users control (ie indirect block numbers etc), then you'd have a good point. At that point, it's obviously entirely up to the filesystem how the heck it encodes it. But that's not what filenames are. Filenames are an index specified by the user, not by the computer. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
