Mauro Tortonesi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > so, as much as i like your patch, i wonder if merging this code in > wget would lead to maintanance headaches which are simply not worth > the effort.
The effort required to do this right is greater than is immediately apparent and the gain is very small. For one, the patch is completely specific to Linux, even though it never mentions it. Wget has strived to be portable and attributes exists on several popular OS'es. Supporting them would require writing a compatibility wrapper around the functionality we use. It should target at least Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD, but there could be many more (once upon a time there was an Amiga patch introducing this very feature, which I rejected). This is further complicated by different operating systems having different naming policies. For example, "user.Content-Location" might make little sense on FreeBSD or Solaris. Finally, we must consider which other attributes we want to expose and how we want to name them to avoid stepping on the toes of other programs that do the same. And what is the gain? The largest number of users is completely clueless about the existence of attributes. Standard Unix programs like `ls' don't list them. As far as I can tell, file managers such as Nautilus and Konqueror don't display them. So who is the target audience of this feature?
