Re: Finding and Reminding, tech issues, 3.0 and beyond

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 14:56 +0200, Tomasz Sterna wrote:
> Dnia 2010-04-14, śro o godzinie 17:10 +0200, Alexander Larsson pisze:
> > >   The other approach is when expiring or archiving to move files
> > >   from ~/Desktop to an archival location like ~/Documents.
> > 
> > I don't have much time to participate in this discussion atm, but i'd
> > like to point out here that the current implementation of the nautilus
> > desktop is done as a "virtual" location that merges various sources. It
> > would not be hard to let it contain any random set of files given a way
> > to locate them. Of course, this would make the "desktop" folder not very
> > useful, and would need similar work in the file selector.
> 
> Users using /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir = on
> (like me) don't even have ~/Desktop directory at all.

The name of it is different (~/) but you do have a "normal" desktop
directory.

> > I'm personally of the opinion that we should use a separate store for
> > such metadata, and then index this with tracker. Which is why i created
> > the gvfs metadata storage:
> > 
> > http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2009/06/24/data-about-data/
> 
> If I understand correctly you are using separate file to store metadata.
> What is behind this decision? Why don't you use VFS Extended attributes?

This is discussed in the comments in the blog post and have been
discussed many times before. Basically, xattrs can't be relied on for
all types of filesystems, they are per-file rather than
per-file-and-user as we want, they have permissions issues, and they are
(sometimes at least) really utterly gobsmackingly slow (see the
comments).

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's a globe-trotting arachnophobic vagrant fleeing from a secret government 
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