Re: A Question about Metadata storage

[Neil Vachharajani <nvachhar pluto njcc com>]

On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Felix Bellaby wrote:

> These cases are genuinely hard to solve. Several solutions have been
> suggested: 
> 
> 1) incorporate the reference into the file - this is nasty, programs
>    that interpret the files will probably break :(
> 
> 2) incorporate the reference into a spare field in the inode - this is
>    non portable to DOS file systems and, I suspect, networked file
>    systems.
> 
> 3) LD_PRELOAD a library that updates the references whenever a call to
>    the routines that change the file system are invoked - this would not
>    work for set{u,g}id processes and could prove very tedious to port.
> 
> 4) Only support reference updating from within GNOME based file move
>    and copy utilities - this restricts use of non-gnome utilities.
> 
> Options 3) or 4) could work with using inode numbers as references. I
> incline towards 4. We could provide gnome-mv and gnome-cp and let users
> alias mv and cp to them in their login scripts. With the inode
> referencing system the extra code would only be called into action when
> moves were made across file systems.
> 

Option 4 does not sound like a good idea.  There are far too many file
utilities to be able to say we'll write a gnome version of every one of
them.  For example, I expect tar to produce reliable backups of files.
Using tar will not preserve the meta data unless of course you remember to
tar these magic inode meta data files.  I think option 4 will cause more
problems than it is worth.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Neil Vachharajani
nvachhar@pluto.njcc.com