Extended attributes
Hello, Gregory!
On Thu, 30 Dec 1999, Gregory Ade wrote:
> My major disappointments with OS/2 were:
...
> c) single user
> To me, it seems a hard call where to put code that would manage this; if
> you use a filesystem where everything is an object (and not just a
> stream), then you turn it into a filesystem thing. if you use a "normal"
> filesystem (like ext2), then you'd have to add a layer on top of it, a-la
> OS/2 and FAT16 with it's "wp data. sf" and "ea data. sf" files... But
> then, in either case, you'd need a component in the GUI to interface to
> either of the filesystems...
GNU Hurd in not a single-user system!
There are several serious objections against having system-wide extended
attributes:
1) Different users may want to associate files with different programs.
John may prefer to open *.html in Lynx, whereas Maggy may prefer Mozilla.
2) How about extended attributes for files that belong to other users and
are not writable by me? Should I be allowed to modify them?
3) How about modifying extended attributes on read-only filesystems? I
want to arrange a certain file to be opened some way, but I cannot do it
because the file is on CD-ROM
4) Different GUI's may have different understanding of what EA's they
need. Even worse, they may have conflicting understanding of it.
> Perhaps it's not *as* useful to have this available from a command line...
It may be useful. You may want to associate some files (not necessarily
with a certain extension) with "gcc" or with "less". You may want to
write personal remarks about e.g. /usr/include/stat.h
But I would prefer to keep such data somewhere under my $HOME
An apparent problem is with removable media, but other computers may have
different software, different paths, different GUI's and different icons,
so the associations are not guaranteed to work anyway.
Pavel Roskin
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