Re: Directories traversal (was Re: the deadly hypercube of death, or: handling permissions)

[Pierre THIERRY]

Scribit Marcus Brinkmann dies 28/04/2006 hora 01:54:
> > Where will these user mutable filesystem reside?
> Whereever we want it to be.  It could be in the form of a union
> filesystem.

Have you already thought about how exactly this could be implemented? In
Unix, users typically occupy a partition, where they can have quotas or
not. The FS deals with allocating space to each user. If each user has
it's FS, we must at least add an allocator layer between the storage
itself and the user. This could be LVM or some sort of it.

Speaking about the users' dir, I was also wondering about how backups
could be made of a FS that contains arbitrary translators.

In the case of $HOME, it would probably be a waste if you backup the
entire space allocated to the user, in same sense that is a waste to
backup the content of a block device instead of the files contained in
it. I think either the user gives a transitive read-only capacity to
it's $HOME, or a capacity whose invocation returns a compact view of the
underlying data of it's FS. It could even be encrypted, if the backup
user should not be able to read $HOME.

> Think outside the box.  We are not talking about a Unixish system
> here.

I think it could be very helpful if we also discuss some times the
higher-level organization of Hurd-NG, because I'm pretty sure I'm not
the only one that has not a clear view of how it could be in practice.

As we were talking about use cases, it would also probably help finding
ones, and also finding contradictions or usability issues in the design.

Broadly,
Nowhere man
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