Re: [Summary] Meta-data/filesystem-encapsulation

[Kevin Littlejohn <darius connect com au>]

[Note: This message is forwarded, as Kevin is too lazy to manualy add
gnome-list to the recipents.  I did it the fun way, because I felt like
excercising the wonderful power of ROOT!  I like the idea.  It dosn't get
rid of resync, of couse, but it gets rid of most of the disadvantage of a
monolithic db.  -=- James]

What about providing a series of small database-manipulation tools, at
command line, for this purpose?  (I'm using mh, so I'm thinking in mh terms
- if you're familiar with it, you'll understand me, if not, I may be babbling :)

If you have really small command-line binaries, essentially 'dbmv', 'dbcp',
'dbrm'-type commands, scripting them into standard cp, rm, mv etc. becomes
a lot easier, and building the GUI on top of that (eg. exmh) also becomes
very easy...

That dodges another stat(), and a check to see who owns the metadata, and
a small level of complexity, _and_ provides the more generic tools to help
others build support into their desktops/environs/whatever...  And provides
a really clear, single entry-point into the database functions, rather than
relying on everyone shifting files around themselves.

KevinL