In-band signaling seems really novel until the moment you encounter the nightmare situation of a filesystem with files containing the signaling characters. @@ isn’t a very common combination, but I’m sure it must happen somewhere.

To keep the universe in alignment, it feels like there should be a mount option to turn that on or off, and the equivalent functionality available via the out-of-band ‘mess of options’ technique (…or should we just grow a way to pass an “options” string straight through from tools and let filesystems eat it or ignore it?…)…

I also had this idea about using something like named pipes to access historical data (is that a job for varsyms?), but I’m not sure how dangerously recursive that could get. On the one hand, it seems like it should be possible/desirable to back those up or copy them around as references/symlinks, but on the other, if you’re relying on a persistent pointer to historical data rather than copying or marking that data into the current working set you want to preserve…. [The FS could specifically preserve historical data that has open references, I guess, but then it has to keep track of all those, and if you remove and recreate the reference, you could be in for a nasty surprise…]

I’ve been meaning to review the mailing lists and raise this there, but I’ve had negative spare time in the past few months, so y’all get an incoherent blog comment instead. ^^