Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4

Timothy Miller
2004-09-09T16:48:43Z

Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Andrew Morton wrote:
>
>>But I'll grant that one cannot go adding new metadata to, say, C files this
>>way. I don't know how useful such a thing is though.
>
>
> That is actually one of the few places where a bit of metadata would be
> very useful. Right now there is no way to indicate in what encoding a
> source is written: ascii, utf-8, ucs16, etc. are all possible. But a
> compiler or interpreter has no good way to figure that out.
>

[NOTE: I am 5000 messages behind. Please forgive any redundancy.]

This reminds me of a paper someone wrote on how HFS(+) stored the file
type (actually, application that knows how to use the file) as metadata,
separate from the filename. He was lamenting the fact that the Mac was
being 'corrupted' by the PC's broken philosophy of including as part of
the filename something which should not be. He also mentioned that
Windows' feature of hiding the extension doesn't cut it. One benefit, I
recall, was that you can't change the association accidentally when
changing the filename. Another thing was that file name and file type
are not semantically related, so they shouldn't be squished together.

I don't remember this well enough, so I can't argue the point, but
having the file type as metadata separate from the filename has SOME
amount of elegant appeal to me.