Re: Metadata.

[Manish Vachharajani <mvachhar vger rutgers edu>]

On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> 
> So far the only reasonable proposal is from Tom Tromey.
> http://www.cygnus.com/~tromey/gnome/metadata.html
> 
> There is no point in continuing arguing about LD_PRELOAD and new file
> systems specific for storing metadata.  We are not going to do it.
> Period.
> 
> If in the future GNOME runs on a system with native metadata support,
> we will support it, before that we will not move a finger.
> 
> I personally would like to suggest a couple of changes to the API
> proposed by Tom.  And it is probably what I will implement for the
> gnome libraries.
> 
> best wishes,
> Miguel.

I think that Tom Tromey's proposal is reasonable but I would like to
emphasize that metadata should NOT be critical for the use of a file.  If
the metadata for a file is lost or unavailable, the application loading
the file should behave identically(Meaning gnumeric sheet files should
load into gnumeric the same with and without metadata, naturally double
clicking the file may not work if the metadata is lost). Metadata should
provide additional and optional info ONLY. This is so that if I tar up a
directory and restore it later I don't need to remember to keep the
metadata to use the file with my GNOME app.  If I recall this used to be a
problems with quicktimes that were moved from MACs to PCs and it was very
annoying. 

Manish Vachharajani
<mvachhar@vger.rutgers.edu>