Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 16:34:35 -0400 From: Jason Andresen <jandrese@mitre.org> To: Greg Black <gjb@gbch.net> Cc: void <float@firedrake.org>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: technical comparison Message-ID: <3B0D705B.189A5C28@mitre.org> References: <20010524082013.G88992-100000@nausicaa.mitre.org> <nospam-990735453.93235@maxim.gbch.net>
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Greg Black wrote: > > "Andresen,Jason R." wrote: > | This still doesn't make sense to me. It's not like the program is going > | to want to do a "find" on the directory every time it has some data it > | wants to put somewhere. I think for the majority of the cases (I'm sure > | there are exceptions) an application program that wants to interact with > | files will know what filename it wants ahead of time. This doesn't > | necessarily mean storing 60,000 filenames either, it could be something > | like: > | I have files fooX where X is a number from 00000 to 60000 in that > | directory. I need to find a piece of information, so I run that > | information through a hash of some sort and determine that the file I want > | is number 23429, so I open that file. > > And if this imaginary program is going to do that, it's equally > easy to use a multilevel directory structure and that will make > the life of all users of the system simpler. There's no real > excuse for directories with millions (or even thousands) of > files. No, there is no excuse, however some third party application (FOR WHICH YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SOURCE[1]) may do it anyway. In the original parent of this post that was the exact situtation. It would be nice if everybody followed the rules and played nice, but it is just something you can't count on in real life. [1] Emphasis added because for people in the Free Software business, it is easy to forget that you don't always have access to the source code, and convincing a company to rewrite their product because it doesn't like your (almost certainly unsupported) OS smacks of futility. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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