Re: Our introduction to Reiser-list

[Peter van Hardenberg <pvh@uvic.ca>]

On October 27, 2005 04:17 am, David Masover wrote:
> Peter van Hardenberg wrote:
> > On October 26, 2005 10:02 am, John Gilmore wrote:
> >
> > And I thought the whole idea was to unify the namespace and make things
> > like ID3 tags obsolete...
>
> The two are not mutually exclusive.  You unify the namespace, and use
> that to access things like ID3 tags.  Of course, eventually ID3 tags
> become obsolete, and the information is instead stored outside of the
> file itself, as a separate stream (treated as a file).  You'd have a
> standard way of serializing any given file and all its metadata, so that
> "something like id3" doesn't have to be re-invented for every file type
> that has metadata, and so that similar metadata can be accessed through
> a standard mechanism -- searching for a particular artist should return
> songs (using id3 tags) and music videos (using the mpeg equivalent) and
> maybe even song lyrics (using separate metadata).

It's much easier, more extensible, and more secure to create a utility which 
ties together a number of userspace metadata libraries to create static files 
than to move them all down into kernel space. I feel plugins providing 
pseudofiles should only be used when there is no viable alternative.

-- 
Peter van Hardenberg (pvh@pvh.ca)
Victoria, BC, Canada