Al Viro wrote:

On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 01:57:33PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

quoted

... or, alternatively, add a subfield to the first field (which would
entail escaping whatever separator we choose):

/dev/md6 /export ext3 rw,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/md6:/users/foo /home/foo ext3 rw,data=ordered 0 0
/dev/md6:/users/bar /home/bar ext3 rw,data=ordered 0 0

Hell, no.  The first field is in principle impossible to parse unless
you know the fs type.

How about making a new file with sane format?  From the very
beginning.  E.g. mountpoint + ID + relative path + type + options,
where ID uniquely identifies superblock (e.g. numeric st_dev)
and backing device (if any) is sitting among the options...

Okay, I see there has been some discussion on this earlier, based on a
proposal by Ram Pai, so it pretty much comes down to redesigning this
right.  I see some issues with his proposal (device numbers exported to
userspace in text form should be separated into major:minor form, for
one thing.)  I know the util-linux-ng people have also had issues with
/proc/mounts that they would like resolved in order to finally nuke
/etc/mtab.

Is Ram still working on this?  I'd like to help make this happen so we
can be done with it.

	-hpa