Re: Meta data

[Mats Loman <mats loman home se>]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Darin Adler wrote:

> on 2/18/01 11:53 PM, Mats Loman at mats loman home se wrote:
> 
> > I wonder: Is anybody actually using the metadata functions in the
> > gnome-libs?
> 
> When we began the Nautilus project we determined that only gmc was using the
> metadata functions in gnome-libs. If anyone is using them outside gmc, I'd
> like to hear about it, because it has sme effects on our plans.

Since my project is not finished ( or near finished ) and can easily
changed, I can easily change to something different.

But:

1. It must not be a very slow method.
2. It must be a method that can easily adapted to store metadata in the
filesystem as metadata ( I'm thinking of Reiserfs and Silicon Graphics
file system that has such capabilites, this could address the problems
with deleting files from "rm" etc. )

Todays gnome-libs metadata functions is quite fast and stores my data in
space conservative way. What I dont like with the gnome-libs functions is
the lack of having system wide metadata ( or am I wrong here? ).

> 
> > I was looking through the Nautilus source code quickly. I looked that Nautilus
> > is using its own metadata (I might be very wrong here).
> >
> > [...]
> > 
> > I need to store the following information about each file:
> > 
> >     a. MD5 Checksum ( or other checksum/ signature )
> >     b. I want to be able to set a Nautilus emblem on a duplicate/changed file.
> > 
> > So the big question is: Can I use metadata functions from the gnome-libs
> > for this?
> 
> This is something that you can't do at all (cleanly) with Nautilus 1.0. The
> problem is something we're hoping to address in a future release, perhaps by
> adding features to gnome-vfs.

Ok!

> 
> A while back, Ian McKellar proposed a design with namespaces (so various
> programs could store their metadata along with the base Nautilus metadata)
> that would be part of gnome-vfs, but we didn't have time to start
> implementing this for the Nautilus 1.0 project.


> 
> The good news is that the metadata is stored in a simple XML format that's
> easy to parse yourself -- you can post to Nautilus list to ask about
> details. The bad news is that without a lower-level I know of no way to
> cooperate with Nautilus and prevent it from overwriting your changes and
> vice versa.
> 
>     -- Darin

It does not sound like a good solution...
> 
> 

Best regards,
Mats Loman