From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hubert Chan Subject: Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4 Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:21:03 -0400 Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <871xhld9lc.fsf@uhoreg.ca> References: <200408311931.i7VJV8kt028102@laptop11.inf.utfsm.cl> <1094040615.2474.50.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, reiserfs-list@namesys.com >>>>> "Alan" == Alan Cox writes: Alan> The icon doesn't belong in the document, that was a catastrophic Alan> disaster in early MacOS (although they only use an index). Users Alan> want to manage their icon choices, tags, tooltip notes and Alan> attached labels, and you cannot do that in the file if you don't Alan> own the file. Most desktop environments provide defaults, but let the user customize their own settings. The substream *could* (I'm not saying if it's a good idea. It's just a possibility.) be used to provide a default icon. Alan> Also the icon is *not* unrelated to the file in a modern GUI, eg Alan> rox and nautilus uses scaled versions of the content for many Alan> media types and will show you pictures, frames from a movie etc to Alan> help you remember the content. For documents, the icon is not completely unrelated, but it isn't something that can be directly extracted. Generating thumbnails usually takes time, so the filemanagers need to cache it somewhere. Right now, they use ~/.thumbnails (at least that's what freedesktop.org recommends), but then you run into consistency issues -- when you delete the file, the thumbnail should be deleted too, and when you rename/move the file, the thumbnail should be attached to the new filename, and not have to be regenerated. Alan> On top they then add user specific annotations. And I think that would be a good use of substreams/attributes/metas too. You don't really want to store it in some separate location, because you run into the same consistency issues as I mentioned before. Sure, if you move a file using Nautilus, it may be smart enough to move the annotations, but I'd bet that mv doesn't know what to do. Alan> The things that are more independant are: Alan> "This file was created by OpenOffice 1.2" "This is a text/plain Alan> file in UTF-8" "This file has a UUID of ...." Alan> The type has dragons because you get heirarchical typing within Alan> documents (consider XML containing namespaces) Well, I think the web guys are going to have to figure something out, and we can just follow what they do ... -- Hubert Chan - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.