Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@nas.nasa.gov> writes:
> Thoughts?

Why would extra flags to open()/fcntl(F_[GS]ETFL,...) be the wrong
thing?

At least naively, i'd think that they'd be the right place to put the
information, for a couple of reasons:

	* you can still have an application support multiple types of
	  access (if concurrent via multiple FDs, if serialized via
	  fcntl()).

	* for many applications that want the 'alternate' operation,
	  it might be unreasonable to recode the application.  e.g.
	  for the compressing file system case, i could easily imagine
	  a "cat --flags fs_raw file" or something similar.  It seems
	  unwieldy to recode all of the I/O calls to cope with this
	  obvious case.

That, at least, seems to be the right way to get the 'alternate
semantics' information into the kernel.  How to pass it around
internally is less interesting to me (I'm not really a VFS guy 8-).

cgd
-- 
Chris Demetriou - cgd@netbsd.org - http://www.netbsd.org/People/Pages/cgd.html
Disclaimer: Not speaking for NetBSD, just expressing my own opinion.