Icons again..

[Christian Scholz <ruebe aachen heimat de>]

Hi!

I am still thinking about the icon problem and here are my thoughts..

First what was here so far (not complete as I didn't had time to read all).

1. .info-Files in the directory as the file is.

   An .info is not good because it will not serve for multiple users
   and it will clutter the disk drive (even more if we use name.uid.info
   which also might not work because you might not be allowed to write
   your info-file in the specific directory.)


2. Keep the information in a separate directory

   Maybe bad because it might be easily corrupted by copying files
   in a shell and not updating the registry properly.
   But will serve for multiple users as everyone can have it's own registry.


3. Keep information directly in the file (with ELF)

   Will not work on non-ELF-Systems and will also not serve for
   multiple users.


So here are my thoughts (I don't want to call them solutions):

1. There should be a way to keep information somewhere directly at the file.
   But I wouldn't store the icon directly inside the file but only a key.
   Then there can be a database/registry etc. which will contain more
   information about that key.
   That way it doesn't matter where the file is as the key will always be
   copied with it.
   One problem appears if you delete that file as the information might still
   be in the database. So maybe there has to be some tool to reorganize it.

2. How to store information in the file?

   The only real solution I can think of which is easy to handle in the shell
   and on the desktop is another filesystem.
   So there might be some wrapper around the original filesystem which just
   has got a different mount point but operates on the filesystem already
   there. What will it do?
   An example:

   We have /home/user on our filesystem. The new filesystem (let's call it
   gnomefs) will then map this to /ghome/user (or whatever mountpoint).
   If we simply make a cp, mv, etc. on /ghome/user/file it will simply
   do that on /home/user/file.
   But if we now want to store additional information it will create a file
   .gnomeinfo.filename on the _original_ filesystem. This file will not appear
   on /ghome/user, only on /home/user.

   That way all information is hidden by using /ghome. I don't think that this
   will be very hard to implement as the new fs only has to operate on the
   underlying fs, so it doesn't have to handle any disk specific things.

Actually I think a new fs which can also store attributes is the only
clean way to come to a solution.

Hope you understood what I mean.. :)

best,
  christian

PS: Maybe someone has said so before but as said above: I don't have that
    much time in the moment and just wanted to share you my thoughts :)