At 18.41 06/12/2003, you wrote:
Agreed; the security model is one issue. For an NT clone, you really need a filesystem capable of supporting ACLs, among other things. Does ext3 support extended attributes? If so, then this could be implemented over top of that;
it could - *if* we want a sloppy and inefficient implementation. ACLs have arbitrary length and are in the vast majority of cases inherited from the parent directory: NTFS, in fact, collapses identical ACLs. And that's just an example. Just speaking feature-wise, NTFS has DOS attributes and DOS short filenames, OS/2 extended attributes, sparse files, compression, encryption, named streams, per-file object ids, reparse points and god knows how many minor ones I've left out. But that's just overlooking the by far biggest issue: what about user ids? Windows NT has globally unique user ids of arbitrary length, vs the fixed-length, locally unique user ids normally found elsewhere. Before you ask: yes, files need to be indexed by SID. Quota management requires it. Good luck implementing all of that with extended attributes