Re: ShadowFs

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 09:52:59AM +0200, Stefan Karrmann wrote:
> By the recent discussion I got the impression that it is a filesystem,
> but a single shadow directory would be easier and - in most cases -
> sufficient.

I am not sure what applications you are thinking of.  However, the type of
applications I am thinking of require all directories to be merged.

$ settrans /cdrom /hurd/isofs /dev/cdrom
$ settrans /tmp/space /hurd/tmpfs 64M
$ settrans /live /hurd/shadowfs /cdrom /tmp/root

And then boot from /live (which is not possible right now because of a
limitation in our boot procedure, it should be possible to pass existing
ports as the root directory port to the booting hurd).  Or use chroot.
Then you have a live CD ROM system.

$ settrans ~/space /hurd/ext2fs ~/image
$ settrans ~/root /hurd/shadowfs / ~/space

And you have a copy of the system which you can boot/chroot, and where you have
write permission to install more packages etc...

$ make install prefix=/tmp/install-root
$ settrans /tmp/root / /tmp/install-root

And you can test the installation in /tmp/root before installing it in the
system.

There are more (like, moving parts of the package management to the
filesystem level).

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de