From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 11118 invoked by uid 1002); 9 Jun 2003 21:52:50 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gentoo-dev-help@gentoo.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Received: (qmail 23045 invoked from network); 9 Jun 2003 21:52:50 -0000 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org From: "ross girshick" Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 17:40:54 -0400 Message-ID: References: <20030605144733.317a7b1c.citizen428@cargal.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org User-Agent: Pan/0.13.4 (She had eyes like strange sins.) Sender: news Subject: [gentoo-dev] Re: (FS) Attributes for Ebuilds? X-Archives-Salt: 1af6d1fe-01a1-4ea4-8378-32c732f1c408 X-Archives-Hash: 38cc9493367aa7e1cafb4c3b7435cb5f Michael, I've actually already implemented something like this for a school project. I built a metadata "database" on top of file system using ext2 and extended attributes. I modified the ext2 kernel module and built two userspace utils for getting and setting the metadata. I also patched portage to set the metadata when installing packages. While designing and building this system I ran into a number practical issues, such as extended attributes are currently only allowed 1 block on disk. Because of this I use a lot of hashing tricks and only store 32bit integers on disk. My user space utils translate between ascii names and integers. My basic goal was to distribute the portage database through the file system so that disk the database represents the actual state of the disk, rather than the state at the time you emerged something. This allows for packages to have files added and removed, while not accumulating cruft over time. Rather than going into too much detail, I suggest that you read the paper that I wrote on it. I haven't had time to get organized, but I can make the source code available soon too. If anyone is interested in working on it please let me know. The paper: http://people.brandeis.edu/~rossgir/pkgman.ps cheers, ross p.s. it should be noted that this project was my first adventure into kernel programming, so it's quite amateurish and could use the guide of a wise sage :). -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list