Is this a Nautilus bug?

Lee Braiden lee_b at digitalunleashed.com
Tue Aug 9 11:25:03 UTC 2005


On Tuesday 09 August 2005 11:17, Dick Davies wrote:
> How is that going to work ? for textfiles, for example.
> Are you talking about some extra attributes in the filesystem?
>
> Have a look around the ArsTechnica OSX articles to see how many ulcers
> this gave Apple.

I'm well aware of the previous issues with it, and with all the programs and 
practices that will have to change on Linux to accomodate it.  Nonetheless, |
I believe it's inevitable.  Everyone used 8.3 filenames in the past just to 
be compatible with MS, even though OSes like AmigaOS could handle something 
255 characters in a filename.  Windows finally bit the bullet and modernised, 
and now it's hard to find 8.3 filenames.

AmigaOS had metadata, by the way, and never got any "ulcers" from it.  
Certainly, it had to be managed at times, just like your internet settings 
have to be managed at times, but it's a standardised system, that works the 
majority of the time, and can be fixed in a standardised way.  Whatever 
computer technology we're talking about, we can't ask for much more than 
that.

Text files now have encodings to deal with anyway: is your text being saved in 
ISO-8859-1, or UTF-8?  What happens to that Chinese translation file for your 
latest software, when uploaded to a central SVN repository that is running on 
a system with a different encoding?  What happens when people download to 
still other encodings?  These metadata issues are catching up with us, and 
m17n and global networking becomes more commonplace.  We simply can't avoid 
dealing with them forever.  The alternative is to deal with them manually 
each time, without any standardisation, which is just short-sighted and 
avoidant.

-- 
Lee Braiden
http://www.DigitalUnleashed.com
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