Re: [gnome-love] Meta Information in GNOME

[Jonathan Bartlett <johnnyb eskimo com>]

I agree with your concerns.  However, there are some important things at
stake here:

1) People continually claim that GNOME is simply copying what others have
done in the user-interface arena.  This is a chance to do something
brand-new

2) Microsoft will be doing similar things soon, however, from what I've
seen it is going to be pretty lame.  It would be nice to have something
better, sooner.

3) I know there are problems, but I think once involved and developing it
will be easier to know a) what those problems are, b) the best approach to
solving them, and, if it requires lower-level support, we will have a
better idea of how much, and specifically where it needs to go.

Having said that, I am unable to put a whole lot of time in it right now,
as I am working on a book in my spare time
(http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/computers/ProgrammingGroundUp/ if you're
interested).  However, I'm sure I can find some time to devote to this if
I can find a GNOME-er willing to help me find my way around GNOME's
internals.

I think the hardest part will be integrating this with Bonobo, which it
will undoubtedly need, especially for manipulating application-specific
metadata (for example, attaching a due date to a document using a calendar
component).

Anyway, I have some specific people to contact, but if anyone else is
interested, let me know.

Jon

On Sat, 18 May 2002, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 08:39:18AM -0700, Jonathan Bartlett wrote:
> > > Except that you then need to make all tools that deal with files of any
> > > sort aware of metadata.  Which is an enormous undertaking.  What happens
> > > if I move a file with CLI tools instead of Nautilus?  If the metadata
> > > isn't attached to the file, it gets lost.  Same with emailing someone
> >
> > Unless you also store the inode.  Then, it only gets lost when moving
> > across filesystems, which isn't that often.  In addition, a GNOME user
> > would be using Nautilus, and a user who is using CLI should be
> > knowledgeable enough to know the consequences of moving.
>
> Please be careful about saying things last this last statement, since
> neither part is true. I use GNOME (both versions 1 and 2) for upwards of
> 12 hours a day, both at work and home. However I don't use Nautilus at all.
>
> I also work with people who use GNOME, but not Nautilus, and who happily
> use the command line (gnome-terminals all over the place). If you added
> something that depended on GNOME for meta-information, how would they
> know that some attachment had to be moved with the file?
>
> > > the file, etc.  Or, if I have metadata on another user's files, how can
> > > I track where it goes?  These are really basic problems that need to be
> > > solved.  Remember also that things like th essentially an implementation
> > > detail.
> >
> > I think inode tracking would solve this.
>
> This is dangerous simply because of the "moving across filesystems"
> problem. To take my own typical usage, for example, I regularly write
> documents and store them somewhere under /home/malcolm and then, when
> they are ready for general use, move them to a directory that everybody
> in the office can access (which happens to be on another file system,
> although that is not obvious unless I am really careful to look and see
> what is mounted where).
>
> The locality or remoteness of a particular directory's filesystem in
> relation to the current one should be transparent, because it's very
> difficult to keep track of and moving files around is a pretty common
> activity.
>
> I don't mean to rain on your parade, since I'm enjoying the meta-data
> discussion in this thread, but this post was wandering down a "near
> enough is good enough path" that is worse than nothing, since it imposes
> extra (and IMHO, unreasonable) restrictions on common ways of doing things.
>
> Cheers,
> Malcolm
>
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