Re: A Question about Metadata storage

[Jean-Baptiste <jbnivoit ix netcom com>]

> Then, down the road, when this nice filetype->app automapping scheme
> is in place, it'll make more sense to have a metadata system which can
> store the 'real' mimetype of a file, instead of just inferring the
> mimetype from the extension.
Which is something that Microsoft invented in the first place probably
because that was the easiest to implement. Deducing the MIME type from
the 'extension'  (which in itself is not a good thing either) is not
a good thing to do, in my opinion. The right way to do that is to have
the FS handle it (as i believe the BeOS FS does, and the Mac has
something
related to that too). However, in the case of GNOME, we don't want to
modify
anything in the FS. So maybe the solution would be to have something
like
'resource forks' stored in files that users don't see but can still be 
manipulated... 

Why not use dot files to do this? Like for instance, for a 'pix.tiff'
file we
would have a '.pix.tiff' file sitting right next to it, and the 'ls'
would not
show it, neither would the file manager (well unless we want it to do
so!).
And if prepending a dot is not enough, we could prepend a string like
'.gnome:' to make it clear that this 'hidden' file is gnome-specific.

And furthermore, if GNOME ever gets ported to Windows or OS/2, for
instance, we could always find a way to accomplish the same thing (i.e. 
to hide the GNOME-specific files) by setting the 'H' attribute on it.

What's good about this is that you don't need to write any specific
utilities to view/modify the contents of those meta-files!

                jb.