Is this a Nautilus bug?

[Lee Braiden]

On Tuesday 09 August 2005 12:40, Dick Davies wrote:
> I know that, but as I said, how is it going to work?
> I'd be interested in the mechanisms involved, but the only sane place
> I can see for such data is in the fs alongside the file itself (as opposed
> to in an external registry of some kind, which I don't think you were
> proposing).

Unix has standards for metadata: extended attributes.

>  My point was that apple have spent over a decade trying to support a Good
> Idea, and (as the ArsTechnica series explains) are now running away from
> the whole idea.

Actually, OS X abandoned their old way in favour of this unix way, too, which 
makes sense considering their transition to a Unix-based OS, and their desire 
to maintain some linux compatibility, etc.:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/7

> > 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?
>
> Any filesystem based metadata you had painstakingly attached to the
> file falls off,
> of course. That's the trouble.

Well, it only falls off it you mess with do things you don't understand.  But 
that's no different from using a journalling filesystem, and not 
understanding it: it doesn't say anything about the technology of journalled 
filesystems if you use incompatible tools with it; it simply means that you 
(or more likely, your distro) has some work to do, finding the correct tools 
etc.

There are archivers that support extended attributes, so you can tar up a 
directory, send it to someone else, and have all that metadata preserved.  
Similarly, version control systems are talking about preserving that.  
Version control could become very integrated with EAs, actually.  Likewise, 
your webserver can serve metadata directly to browsers (it currently guesses 
that metadata), so you win there, too.  Every bit of progress requires some 
new changes in behaviour, but EAs are not a huge leap that will leave 
everyone in serious trouble; just a little tricky.

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