Re: File System conversion -- ideas

[Jan Harkes <jaharkes@cs.cmu.edu>]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2003 at 04:29:45PM -0400, rmoser wrote:
> NO!  You're not getting the point at all!
> 
> You don't need a pair!  If you have 10 filesystems, you need 10 sets of
> code in each direction, not 90.  You convert from the data/metadata set
> in the first filesystem to a self-contained atom, and then back from the
> atom to the data/metadata set in the new filesystem.  The atom is object
> oriented, so anything that can't be moved over--like ACLs or Reiser4's
> extended attributes that nobody else has, or permissions if converting to
> vfat--is just lost.  Note that if the data has an attribute like "Compressed"
> or "encrypted", it is expanded/decrypted and thus brought back to its
> natural form before being stuffed into an atom.

I typically call that 'tar' and it works great whenever I want to
convert from one filesystem to another. I just haven't got a clue why
you want to implement tar (or cpio) in the kernel as the userspace
implementation is already pretty usable.

Jan