Re: [PATCH] ramfs: pretend dirent sizes

[Chris Wedgwood <cw@f00f.org>]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 09:14:04PM +0200, Jan Blunck wrote:

> >So you can seek to m*<stack-depth>+<offset> to access an offset into
> >something at depth m?
> >
>
> Yes.

Hos does that work if offset >= m?

> I disagree. Where is the information value of i_size if we always
> could return 0?

Directories clearly can't have zero size, so 0 means 'special'.

Anything other than zero *might* be a real value.

> IMO it should be at least an upper bound for the "number" of
> informations that could actually be read (in terms of a seek offset)
> like it is in the case of regular files.

Why?  And what should that upper bound be?

> Better, if it is a strict upper bound so that you can seek to every
> value smaller than i_size. For this purpose the i_size of
> directories doesn't need to reflect any unit.

lseek talks about bytes --- yes, it means for files specifically but I
still don't see why we need to define more counter-intuitive semantics
for directories when we don't need them.

Also, how is lseek + readdir supposed to work in general?