Re: Streams support in Linux

[Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>]

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.