On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 10:05:31AM -0700, Jeremy Allison via samba-technical wrote: > On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 08:03:03PM -0500, Steve French via samba-technical wrote: > > On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 5:37 PM Al Viro via samba-technical > > > > > > Better yet, you need some new objects to represent those things, since > > > you don't want any informative dentries. And not fs-private ones, at > > > that, since those new syscalls of yours would have to operate on them > > > (after all, renaming something opened would probably be expected to > > > have the opened descriptor to keep accessing the same object, wouldn't > > > it?) > > > > These are interesting questions, and there are cases where streams > > have been shown to have value in Windows, and for Apple (in Macs). > > Don't know whether the Solaris equivalent was useful - but presumably > > was. > > Sorry Steve, can't let this pass :-). Please name *one* case > where streams have value in Windows or Mac. And I'm not talking > about the case for EA's, these clearly have value (plus we already > have them :-). > > I'm talking about a case where there is clear value in having > an openable/seekable stream on a file/directory. > > I can't think of a *single* case where a stream adds more > utility than an EA used in the same case. > > I don't want theoretical "well it would be nice if..", > I want clear "we couldn't have done it any other way" > kinds of things. Actually, to answer my own question, I do know of one valid application that uses named streams. The CIA exfiltration tools exposed by WikiLeaks used a named stream on a top-level share directory to hide data being stolen from the target (which is why I guess the CIA doesn't employ NSA-level people, the NSA almost certainly use the hidden data area behind Windows ACL store instead as no known scanning tools look at that :-). So if we really want to enable such things, by all means add named streams to Linux :-) :-).
