Re: ioctls for gnome-vfs

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 02:47:42PM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> I don't see why it is more useful than a libid3 for a mp3 player and 
> libgsf for Word documents. Both of those libraries are much better suited 
> to the corresponding app than a generic tags library.

while I agree there is line to be drawn.  gnome-vfs has a handler
for tar files.  By this logic it might be better to move it into gsf
with zip and ole.  Do we want to keep format implementation in other
libraries ?

> > But this also leaves the window open for custom vfs methods to support
> > wacky metadata, like http headers, or the the target filename of a
> > virtual file-system.
> > 
> > Anyways, I'm willing try out a library that layers tags on top of vfs's
> > metadata storage (using the same api as vfs-metadata).  One that will
> > first see if a given metadata tag is supported by the mime-type, and if
> > not falls back to gnome-vfs' metadata api.  If applications begin to use
> > it and it works out okay, we can reevaluate if it should be rolled into
> > vfs.  Cool?
> 
> I'm fine with that of course, since I probably won't use it. It could even 
> use an ioctl to implement the per-method wacky metadata. :) 

It sounds like we may be shoveling too many different kinds of
metadata together.  When you start talking about http headers I
worry about knowing which metadata you are asking for.

eg
    Use http to pull down an gzipped xls file.  Metadata for that
    url is going to be for what ? and this ignores the metadata for
    subdocuments embedded in the xls.