Re: Suggestion for file type detection approach

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 12:11, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 10:32, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 17:32, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> > 
> > > anyways, because pre-caching makes such a huge impact on sniffing, it
> > > does suggest that the process is i/o bound (duh, makes sense). and so
> > > cacheing these sniff results in EA or some other file or something might
> > > definitely be a way to go.
> > 
> > Not commenting on the general issue, but the EA caching thing is a
> > non-starter. Reading an EA is just like reading a normal file, its not
> > stored in the dirent. So, given that its as fast to read a block as it
> > is to read the few bytes of the mimetype string, reading EAs is bound to
> > be the same speed as sniffing.
> 
> er, good point. no reason you couldn't have an inode->mime_type mappings
> file somewhere in the directory tho... that should be extremely fast.

We need a gnome-metadata db to do this.  Medusa has the posix + mimetype
+ keywords in its DB.  It could return all this information for a
directory in a single query, Medusa isn't ready for prime time.  

All file managers are over-whelmed by the gigs of data stored in simple
directories, and no smart file system centralizes the EAs in a DB that
can be queried.  After all, file managers work with files, plural.

We can alter some of the gnome-vfs modules to update the gnome-metadata
db during write options.  The file manager can have direct access to the
db add additional data to files.  All GNOME metadata would be synced to
the file-system.  An indexer is needed to watch a few directories that
are likely to change (Desktop, Documents, etc..) to catch changes made
by non-GNOME apps.  This same indexer will need to crawl the filesystem
intermittently to locate changes made by non-GNOME apps outside of the
watch directories.  The gnome-metadata db would be filesystem agnostic.

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.