Re: ioctls for gnome-vfs

[Ian McKellar <yakk yakk net>]

Hi guys,

I can see the value of both ioctls and metadata. In fact, probably
ioctls on handles & uris and metadata on handles & uris. Ioctls can be
used to control something about the uri - for example telling a cdda://
uri to eject, and metadata can be used for getting/setting arbitary
properties.

If we look at the WebDAV model of metadata they classify metadata
properties into two categories: live and dead metadata. Live metadata is
derived from the files themeselves, it includes stuff like size,
mime-type, etc. Dead metadata is attached by applications. I think the
distinction is important.

I'm really not sure if we should be transparently extracting id3 and
word author information from files transparently, but I think it might
be appropriate for applications that are interested in id3 tags to cache
the information in dead metadata once they've read it. This means of
course that we need to keep track of modification times on metadata.

Ian