Re: [gnome-love] Meta Information in GNOME

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 08:39:18AM -0700, Jonathan Bartlett wrote:
> > Except that you then need to make all tools that deal with files of any
> > sort aware of metadata.  Which is an enormous undertaking.  What happens
> > if I move a file with CLI tools instead of Nautilus?  If the metadata
> > isn't attached to the file, it gets lost.  Same with emailing someone
>
> Unless you also store the inode.  Then, it only gets lost when moving
> across filesystems, which isn't that often.  In addition, a GNOME user
> would be using Nautilus, and a user who is using CLI should be
> knowledgeable enough to know the consequences of moving.

Please be careful about saying things last this last statement, since
neither part is true. I use GNOME (both versions 1 and 2) for upwards of
12 hours a day, both at work and home. However I don't use Nautilus at all.

I also work with people who use GNOME, but not Nautilus, and who happily
use the command line (gnome-terminals all over the place). If you added
something that depended on GNOME for meta-information, how would they
know that some attachment had to be moved with the file?

> > the file, etc.  Or, if I have metadata on another user's files, how can
> > I track where it goes?  These are really basic problems that need to be
> > solved.  Remember also that things like th essentially an implementation
> > detail.  
>
> I think inode tracking would solve this.

This is dangerous simply because of the "moving across filesystems"
problem. To take my own typical usage, for example, I regularly write
documents and store them somewhere under /home/malcolm and then, when
they are ready for general use, move them to a directory that everybody
in the office can access (which happens to be on another file system,
although that is not obvious unless I am really careful to look and see
what is mounted where).

The locality or remoteness of a particular directory's filesystem in
relation to the current one should be transparent, because it's very
difficult to keep track of and moving files around is a pretty common
activity.

I don't mean to rain on your parade, since I'm enjoying the meta-data
discussion in this thread, but this post was wandering down a "near
enough is good enough path" that is worse than nothing, since it imposes
extra (and IMHO, unreasonable) restrictions on common ways of doing things.

Cheers,
Malcolm

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