From: Josh England <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Jan Hudec wrote: > On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 13:36:14 -0700, Tom Lord wrote: > >> > A single 'second-order' metadata string would basically give infinite >> > flexibility in terms of metadata. [...] would >> > allow any number of creative facilities to be built on top of it. >> >>A unique fixed string per file would have the same effect and we >>already have one of those.
I understand what you're getting at. One could archive their own metadata file(s) indexed by the file ID, then manage the metadata in surrounding wrappers. This actually does effectievly allow generic metadata to be created. Perhaps explicitly adding it to arch is not necessary. Maybe just detailing how this could work in the documentation would be enough. However, providing a fast/formal/consistent indexing method would also be nice, that way the metadata is always in the same place instead of being different in every archive. Yes, yes. In extension, arch is already close to and is likely to evolve into a fully general "tree-oriented database" with indexing and retrieval features for fine-grained access more closely tied to archive transactions (which themselves will expand to allow composite transactions). Meta-data built-in, sure sure. At that point, and in combination with UI frameworks like awiki and indexing tools like BDB, Arch will pretty much make popular commercial relational database frameworks look like crude stone tools by comparison. But first we have to argue for 3.5 GD years about whether or not `~/=tagging-method' is or is not a sufficiently ugly filename that it should be replaced by an MSQL database of XML fragments using the `my-aunties-fanny' Schema. But I digress (it's friday), -t _______________________________________________ Gnu-arch-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users GNU arch home page: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
