Salut,

On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 07:58:40PM -0400, Horst von Brand wrote:
> >   Also,  you  are thinking _very_ narrowly now. There are thousands of
> >   file  formats.  Implementing  the  support  for  meta-data/ streams/
> >   attributes  in  the  kernel  will  make  it  possible  to  use  this
> >   generically for all files.
> 
> So the _kernel_ has to know about thousands of formats, just in case it
> some blue day it comes across a strange file? Better leave that to the
> applications.

I'd  do  that  quite  differently:  Collect metadata  about  files  in
extended attributes (which are  rather universally useable), and do it
from  an userspace daemon/application/file  manager plugin  which uses
dynamically   loadable   plugins   for   the  different   file   types
differentiated by libmagic.

This has nothing to do in the kernel.

			    Tonnerre