Apple OS X Tiger adds arbitrary metadata support

Apple OS X Tiger adds arbitrary metadata support

[Hubert Chan]

Just FYI, according to Ars Technica's review of Apple's Tiger, Apple has
added (preliminary) support for arbitrary (well, not quite arbitrary)
metadata.  It looks like they've decided to use the xattr interface,
though, so their namespace is fragmented.  The reviewer also lists some
problems and limitations of the implementation.  One problem is speed --
if a file has many xattrs, adding more xattrs is time consuming.  The
reviewer also notes that on filesystems that don't support "forks" or
xattrs, Mac OS X will use "._" notation -- that is, the metadata for
file "foo" will be stored in the file "._foo".

The Ars review can be found here:
  http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
They start talking about metadata on page 6:
  http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/6
and it goes on until page 8.

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert@uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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Re: Apple OS X Tiger adds arbitrary metadata support

[David Masover]

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They've also added support for one of the main features we were talking
about with our plugins/metadata:  instantaneous, up-to-date searches.

Basically, they catch any modification to the FS and pass it on to the
search feature, which indexes only what has been changed.  Then, all
open "search folders" are automagically updated.  Any new search is
lightning-fast, but no matter when the search is run, it's automatically
up-to-date.

This gives me a bit of deja-vu, because the way users will be treating
their data now sounds a bit like one of the more database-like features
of reiser's "future vision" paper.  It amounts to one of gmail's
slogans:  Search, don't sort.  Why have a folder hierarchy at all, and
go to the trouble of setting up and sorting such a tree, when you can
have the OS automatically sort things into "folders" based on what you
need at the time?
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