separate read-file and read-dir protocol requests

Hello All,

(I'm the guy who on my spare time is very slowly porting the linux
ext2fs to VSTa)

I have a question (and suggestion). Since I'm VSTa-ling (and Linuxing)
at home only and emailing at work, this is from my memory.

Why does reading a file and reading a directory take the same request
(FS_READ, if I remember well)? I believe this is wrong (or at least a
poor choice) because:

1) currently, reading a dir produce a succession of lines, one per
filename. Consequently (as I understand it), a filename can't contain
a newline character (which is permitted by Posix).

2) even on many modern Unixes, there are two different syscalls
(getdents and read) for reading a directory and a plain file

3) most utilities use readdir (or getdents) for reading directories,
so having a separate read-dir request would, in my humble opinion,
almost just need recoding readdir.

4) more interestingly, it would be very difficult to implement a
filesystem where file have both directory and bytestream structures
(like on the MacIntosh OS -forks- or the TRON OS). I believe that such
a feature is highly desirable; for instance, it would make adding
user-level metadata easier (eg an icon for a file would be just the
.ICON direntry, etc). Also, an executable would use such a thing for
symbol tables, etc. Actually, section-structured files (like
ar,tar,cpio,ELF formats on Unixes) would be easier.

Any comments?

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