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[[!tag open_issue_hurd]]


# IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2012-04-22

    <youpi> btw, I was wondering, when working on namespace mangling, did they
      think about automatitioning ?
    <youpi> autopartitioning, I meant
    <youpi> i.e. with a foo.img file, open foo.img,,part1
    <braunr> what are you referring to with namespace mangling
    <youpi> and voila
    <youpi> I don't remember the exact term they used
    <braunr> you mean there is a hurd library that parses names and can direct
      to different services depending on part of the name ?
    <youpi> namespace-based_translator_selection
    <youpi> yes
    <braunr> i thought it only handled directories
    <braunr> well, the classical path representation
    * civodul finds it ugly
    <youpi> civodul: because of potential conflict, and the not-too-nice ",,"
      part?
    <youpi> actually I wonder whether using directory access would be nicer
    <youpi> i.e. you have a foo.gz, just open foo.gz/gunzip to get the unzipped
      content
    <youpi> and for foo.img.gz, open foo.img.gz/gunzip/part/1
    <civodul> youpi: because of the interpretation of special chars in file
      names
    <civodul> users should be free to use any character they like in file names
    <civodul> foo.gz/gunzip looks nicer to me
    <youpi> ok, so we agree
    <youpi> that said, the user could choose the separator
    <youpi> the namespace can be not run by root for everybody, but just for
      your shell, run by yourself
    <antrik> civodul: the user can't use any character anyways... '/' and '\0'
      are reserved :-P
    <civodul> antrik: '/' isn't quite reserved on the Hurd :-)
    <civodul> you could implement dir_lookup such that it does something
      special about it
    <civodul> (server-side)
    <antrik> civodul: as for overloading '/', although I haven't thought it
      through entirely, I guess that would work for nodes that present as files
      normally. however, it would *not* work for directory nodes
    <antrik> which would be quite a serious limitation IMHO
    <antrik> I can think of various kinds of useful directory translators
    <antrik> what's more, one of the main use cases I originally had in mind is
      a policy filter
    <antrik> you could pass a directory name with a appropriate filter applied
      to tar for example, so it wouldn't try to follow any translators
    <antrik> I don't see why taking an obscure prefix like ,, would be much of
      a problem in practice anyways
    <antrik> (also, it doesn't strictly prevent the user from having such file
      names... you just need to escape it if accessing such files through the
      namespace multiplexer. though admittedly that would need some special
      handling in *some* programs to work properly)