RE: Performance

["Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)" <amadorm usm edu ec>]

> the first time that nautilus is run in a directory it would certainly not
> solve the staleness, but the second time, once all the files have their
> mime type set in a EA it would be very fast and there would not be any
> staleness.

At least for MIME types, I find it a great idea that Nautilus fills it
in an EA when it's empty.  Evidently Nautilus wouldn't need to derive it
from the file content a second time.  The whole point of this EA thing
is that every future application would set the EA accordingly, but as a
stopgap measure it would help greatly if Nautilus set the MIME type EA
if the file had none.

> 
> yes, it is a like cache, but it would not have to be renew each time
> nautilus is run, also it would not take any memory, the EAs are handled by
> the OS.

Sooo right.  Metadata is the way we're going, and there's no helping
that.  Me glad that Microsoft chose a "metadata in a separate database"
approach, which is inherently inferior, slower performing, and won't be
as up to date as the EA storage in Linux filesystems.

Oh, I know GNOME is supposed to run on all UNIX environments, but this
EA functionality can be easily emulated with .metafiles, as it is being
done right now.

> 
> the bad thing is that the the problem would persist for those file systems
> that do not support EAs. It was just an idea anyway.