Re: A Question about Metadata storage

[Felix Bellaby <felix pooh u-net com>]

Neil Vachharajani wrote:

>> We could provide gnome-mv and gnome-cp and let users
>> alias mv and cp to them in their login scripts. With the inode
>> referencing system the extra code would only be called into action
>> when moves were made across file systems.
>
> [This] does not sound like a good idea.  There are far too many file
> utilities to be able to say we'll write a gnome version of every one
> of them.  For example, I expect tar to produce reliable backups of
> files. Using tar will not preserve the meta data unless of course you
> remember to tar these magic inode meta data files.  I think [this]
> will cause more problems than it is worth.

This sounds like a fair point at first but then consider how tar works:
it produces a copy of the contents of the file. The only way that tar
will preserve meta data is if you actually put it inside the file. This
is not a good idea for executables, etc.

The same is true of other utilities like ftp, mail, etc. Using spare
fields in the inodes to hold the meta data breaks down in all these
cases as well. Looks like gnome may need to rewrite a LOT of basic
utilities or hide the file system completely :(

Felix