Filesystem ideas

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski <maniek@beer.com>]

I think these filesystem improvements would be useful :

1)
Directory attribute SIGNIFICANT_FILES_ORDER.
If `ls' or CUI filesystem explorer would find this flag on directory,
or if shell would expand globs over this directory, and they would
find that flag, they would not sort the result, but give it to user as-is.
Example purpose: audio CDs

2)
Multicast files.
This is often useful to cast the same to many files.
It would be nice if GNU/Hurd suported this.

Interface could be:
/* new fd, -1  error */ int multicast_new (int normal_fd);
/*   0 ok, -1 errror */ int multicast_add (int mc_fd, int normal_fd);

Example purpose: console+log output, servers optimalization

3)
Filesystem Object (File/Directory/etc) attribute DYNAMIC_CONTENT.
This would mean you CAN get file size, directory content, etc.,
but this is non-trivial for them to raport it and
should be done only on purpose.

Example purpose: /proc/*, files mounted over ftpfs,
                 unmouned /mnt/* filesystems

4)
system call like this
size_t transfer_data (int file_in, int file_out, size_t size);

There is such thing on both newer Linuces and NT.

Example purpose: major optimalization on multi-server environment
                 (huge memory usage is GNU/Hurd's biggest performance problem)
		 servers optimalization

Are they very problematic ?
Anyone working on something like that ?