Re: [Relfs-devel] New RelFS prototype, with query ability - and binary release

[Jasper v. de G. <th....@hc...>]

rel...@li... wrote:
> On Saturday 08 Oct 2005 05:39, Vincenzo Ciancia said to us all:
> 
> Its confusing to have filenames which are the same in the same directory, and 
> may cause complications. This can be resolved with the address attribute of 
> the harddisc address, which resolves adding extra junk into the table or 
> database. Queries would not need an extra redundant name.
> When I deleted an ntfs partition, and made several ext3 partitions by mistake 
> overhastily, I then tried to get them back, and used several tools, both 
> windows and linux. A number of ways that they were portrayed gave me scope to 
> see where they were, even though they had the same names, as the tools put 
> all the files into numbered directories instead of in their original dirs 
> which had been lost. This real life scenario helped me to unformat certain 
> blocks and clusters, so I had to check their real addresses in order to bring 
> what I could back. Am I of any help?
> Hal

It is indeed a reasonable solution, but it is does have some drawbacks:
  - It only serves to distinguish files, it doesn't tell the user 
anything about what file it is.
  - It might change unexpectedly if the files are reordered (which is 
not uncommon, although perhaps uncommon enough to cause not too many 
problems).

I can live with the first one, and the second could be worked around by 
not using an actual blocknumber but some kind of artificial index. Apart 
from these minor drawbacks, however, it also doesn't solve the problem 
of saving/renaming files (you obviously don't want people to enter these 
numbers, yet it should be possible to overwrite files for example, as 
well as to create new files). I'd be interested in any ideas you (or 
others) may have on the subject though (might not be entirely on-topic, 
but the mailinglist doesn't seem to be busy enough for that to be much 
of a problem).