RE: metadata proposal

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Dries, Joseph wrote:

> > I've taken Tom's excellent proposal and modified it as I've seen fit

I want to say now that I did this hurredly.  I will release a new revision
as soon as possible. 

> mind: I agree that a system that depends on metadata the best solution would
> be support in the filesystem for metadata, much like the Mac and OS/2 do.
> 	The detail that I'm concerned about is that anyone who goes in that
> direction (adding support for ext2, or other *BSD, Solaris, SunOS, AIX,

Let us please isolate these issues.  The storage of metadata is a
completely different issue than the implementation of metadata.  Putting
this data into the filesystem is a specific type of storage, independent
metadata implementation.

> 	Specifically, if users go adding comments, icons, etc. to a file. In

To answer your question: "users" cannot add metadata to a file, only file
"owners".  Any user who wanted to annotate a file would have said data
stored in a personal database, and this personal database would not be
able to live inside the file system.  It would *have* to live on top,
either in a home directory or in a /var/mail style directory.

--
Christopher Curtis               - http://www.ee.fit.edu/users/ccurtis
                                 - System Administrator, Programmer
Melbourne, Florida  USA          - http://www.lp.org/