On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 3:33 AM Ian Kent <raven@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue, 2020-08-04 at 16:36 +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote: > > And notice how similar the above interface is to getxattr(), or the > > proposed readfile(). Where has the "everything is a file" > > philosophy > > gone? > > Maybe, but that philosophy (in a roundabout way) is what's resulted > in some of the problems we now have. Granted it's blind application > of that philosophy rather than the philosophy itself but that is > what happens. Agree. What people don't seem to realize, even though there are blindingly obvious examples, that binary interfaces like the proposed fsinfo(2) syscall can also result in a multitude of problems at the same time as solving some others. There's no magic solution in API design, it's not balck and white. We just need to strive for a good enough solution. The problem seems to be that trying to discuss the merits of other approaches seems to hit a brick wall. We just see repeated pull requests from David, without any real discussion of the proposed alternatives. > > I get that your comments are driven by the way that philosophy should > be applied which is more of a "if it works best doing it that way then > do it that way, and that's usually a file". > > In this case there is a logical division of various types of file > system information and the underlying suggestion is maybe it's time > to move away from the "everything is a file" hard and fast rule, > and get rid of some of the problems that have resulted from it. > > The notifications is an example, yes, the delivery mechanism is > a "file" but the design of the queueing mechanism makes a lot of > sense for the throughput that's going to be needed as time marches > on. Then there's different sub-systems each with unique information > that needs to be deliverable some other way because delivering "all" > the information via the notification would be just plain wrong so > a multi-faceted information delivery mechanism makes the most > sense to allow specific targeted retrieval of individual items of > information. > > But that also supposes your at least open to the idea that "maybe > not everything should be a file". Sure. I've learned pragmatism, although idealist at heart. And I'm not saying all API's from David are shit. statx(2) is doing fine. It's a simple binary interface that does its job well. Compare the header files for statx and fsinfo, though, and maybe you'll see what I'm getting at... Thanks, Miklos
