Re: Nautilus, metadata and extendet attributes

[Ryan Boder <icanoop bitwiser org>]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2004 at 12:23:48PM -0500, Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:
> > I ask for ages: why? Many people are screaming that it dangerous, but no
> > one shown any scenario how it can be dangerous.
> 
> Trust me.  It is.  You're witnessing it on the Windows world. 
> Furthermore, if you SHOW extensions instead of hiding them, you're
> compounding the problem because that causes user confusion (you can't
> expect everyone to be born knowing what DOC, PCX, XLS and stuff means,
> and if you can help them into not needing to know, so much the better).

I don't agree that it's dangerous in Nautilus like it is in Windows, since
nautilus does not hide the extension and also does not execute files because
they have a .exe extension.

I do think encoding the file type in the name is stupid though. A file name
is exactly that, a name. It's not some data structure that you should add
fields to when you want to add features that require meta data.

For example, say you want to add full access control lists to a file system.
The obvious way to do that is to store the ACL in some kind of meta data
along with the file or possibly the directory the file is in.

If you went the file extension route you would encode the ACL in the file
name possibly with '-' as a delimiter. So if you had a text file called myfile
that can be accessed by bob and harry you would change the name to
myfile.txt-bob-harry. That would work and it would be faster, like file
extensions. It's just stupid. It's error prone and it forces the user to be
a programmer, just like file extensions do now. 

Just because Windows made a stupid choice a long time ago does not mean that
we should live with it. Especially when we are trying to make Linux more
usable to non programmers. Most of the non programmers I know still run into
problems with file extensions today. And that's because they are not
programmers and file typing should be a programmer issue.

-- 
Ryan Boder
http://www.bitwiser.org/icanoop