2009/387 [Pathname Reparse Points]

[Robert Thurlow]

Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> This sounds reasonable, and is not like the case of AFS which uses 
> special tokens in symbolic links that can expand to other things.

That's our model, yes.

> I'm a bit concerned about potential effects on applications, it *seems* 
> like this is done in a manner that is safe, but there are a few items:
> 
>    * are applications consistent in their use of pathconf/fpathconf to 
> get filesystem limits

Not sure.

>    * presumably archivers and such are not expected to traverse these?  
> (they get handled like an ordinary symbolic link)

Correct - we only want the symlink bytes.  The main issue is the
potential size, we think.

>    * what happens when the referral is archived and then reextracted?  
> (is the attribute lost?)

The attribute is not sent in the archive stream, but will be re-applied
by generic code when the symlink is recreated.  We envision code to look
at the contents in fop_symlink() to set the bit on create, whether the
create was via NFS or ZFS.

Rob T