Re: state of metadata?

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

>  What is the state of metadata?

It works.

>  Does anybody know if EXT3 is going to bring some metadata support?

Ask SCT.  And in any case, this would not be immediately applicable to
GNOME, since it is not Linux-specific.  And this has a bunch of other
issues; what happens if you work on a box with a local metadata-aware
filesystem and then work on the same files via NFS?  You wouldn't be
able to access the metadata.

>  The problem with metadata external to the filesystem is that not
>  GUI tools (like mv, rm, etc.) could interfere with metadata. 

I am sure the GNU fileutils maintainers would be happy to take patches
to support GNOME-style metadata.

>  There has been a big issue on gnome-ui-list about a trash icon in
>  Gnome, but many things are difficult to implement without metadata
>  support in the filesystem. (above all, problems related to not GUI
>  tools).

<flame>
Oh, don't worry about gnome-gui-list.  Maybe we should rename it to
gnome-pie-in-the-sky-list.
</flame>

Seriously, metadata and user interfaces are completely orthogonal
concepts.  Nothing prevents non-GUI programs from having GNOME-style
metadata support for files.

  Federico