Re: A Question about Metadata storage

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Felix Bellaby wrote:

> This sounds like a fair point at first but then consider how tar works:
> it produces a copy of the contents of the file. The only way that tar
> will preserve meta data is if you actually put it inside the file. This
> is not a good idea for executables, etc.
> 
> The same is true of other utilities like ftp, mail, etc. Using spare
> fields in the inodes to hold the meta data breaks down in all these
> cases as well. Looks like gnome may need to rewrite a LOT of basic
> utilities or hide the file system completely :(

This has also been discussed to no end.  The only viable quick&dirty
solution is to have a LD_PRELOAD library that would query a metadata
daemon and attempt to store as many attributes as it can.  The only
solution is to have fully GNOME-aware utilities.  This is not quite as
difficult as it first seems because we simply have to add metadata
extensions to the GNU utils we already use.  Again reference previous
posts about /opt/GNOME/usr/bin.

In the specific case of tar, the (yes, LD_PRELOAD) libraries would have to
realize that the only viable method of storing metadata is of the
"file"->"file + file.mdata" style.  If restored using a non-GNOMEd
instance of tar, it would restore two seperate files.  This could be
extremely difficult (could it recognize an mt output stream?)

Them's the breaks.

by the way:  This has nothing to do with the issue of where the data is
stored.  It is the issue of GNOME vs non-GNOME.

--
Christopher Curtis               - http://www.ee.fit.edu/users/ccurtis
                                 - System Administrator, Programmer
Melbourne, Florida  USA          - http://www.lp.org/