On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Ted Lemon wrote:

> 
> > If you really don't like it, you don't have to define options LIFFS. :-)
> 
> I think a lot of us agree that it would be nice to put more stuff into
> an inode.   What we don't agree on is what stuff, and not defining the
> LIFFS option doesn't fix this problem.

This message is one of the saner things which has been said so far. :-)

Our thought about this was that these extra uses could come along later.
The extra space has a flags field. We didn't expect 32 extra things to
come along - if we're trying to cram that much into an inode, we have bad
feature creap.

These flag bits would indicate what extra goddies are there, like
Y2038-safe dates, support for more than 32-bits worth of blocks (I think
that was one of the things Perry mentioned, but I'm not sure if our
indirect block system would support that?), support for acl's, etc. As
features arrive, dump, restore, ffs, & friends get taught about them.

That way we don't have to decide now what we want to do, we leave space
for future growth. Also, we don't have to wait for these features to be
defined to move forward. :-)

Take care,

Bill