> My thought is that if we make your changes and then latter add common 
> routines, we won't be that far from where we are now. It will be like we 
> take eight steps north then seven steps south. So why not just make the 
> one step now and save a lot of grief?

i don't understand why you're objecting so much against details
while the result should be similar as you say...

as i said first, what i'd like do is pushing fs-dependent things
into their own code.  pushing the code into them, and then introduce
common subroutines if needed, seems like a straightforward way to me.

> I mean what really is wrong with what we have now? The fact that 
> cache_lookup() will remove entries if MAKEENTRY is not set is wrong. We 
> want to remove it for remote file systems, and if we do we want to tweak 
> local file systems as you did in your initial patch. Since we will now get 
> into the negative-cache-entry case for DELETE and RENAME operations, we 
> need to define what we want to have happen there. We also need the changes 
> you proposed to nfs and smbfs.
> 
> Other than that, what do we need to do? What semantics do we need to add 
> or change?

don't forget about "CREATE on negative cache" case.

> Put another way, I think we can change our current name cache routines to 
> support remote file system semantics in addition to supporting local file 
> system semantics. I think these changes will be smaller than the changes 
> you just proposed.

how in particular?

YAMAMOTO Takashi