Re: About metadata (long!)

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, Christopher Curtis wrote:

Yes, a followup to my own message.

> > > I'm not saying it's not, but metadata *inside* the file should not be used
> > > within GNOME.  Instead, a utility to extract that data and create
> > > "appropriate" metadata entries should be used.
> > 
> > I agree that GNOME should access it through the metadata API. However,
> > I think the difference between having the metadata system run code to
> > extract the metadata 'on the fly' and the kind of 'pre-processing' you
> > are talking about where a utility would create the appropriate
> > metadata entries is an optimization issue which dosn't have a simple
> > 'this is better' answer. 

As another point, there's nothing to prevent this from being done at
run-time.  Imagine it tries to extract the data from the metadata database
but it doesn't exist.  It's forced to use a fallback method of actually
physically opening the file and examining the contents.  There's nothing
technically preventing it from then taking that data and storing it in the
database for quick retrieval later.

Christopher