Re: ioctls for gnome-vfs

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 03:55:34AM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On 15 Nov 2002, Alex Graveley wrote:
> > I think it depends completely on the metadata being twiddled.  For
> > instance: idealy we would want metadata stored on an mp3 and prefixed
> > with "id3-tag:" to be stored in the id3 section of the file itself. 
> > Just as likely is setting headers in an http transfer, before a read or
> > write; in this case the meta-data should only be available for setting
> > on an open file handle, and not on a URI.
> 
> Meta-data changes changing the actual file? Ick! That wouldn't be metadata 
> at all, that would be data.

That depends alot on your perspective.  Most Office style documents
have metadata streams of some sort bundled into the file.  For me
the document is the data, and the extra tags like 'wordcount' or
'original author' are metadata.  libgsf has some initial work on a
generalized representation for MS Office prop sets and OpenOffice
manifest documents.
 
> I'd love to have a real metadata API in gnome-vfs, but I don't think it 
> can replace a real per-backend ioctl style operation. While for some 
> designs of metadata you might be able to hack it into doing backend 
> specific things that is really not what metadata is for.

Agreed.  These seem like very different issues to me.