Hi, I would like to see the extended attributes more widely used, especially for the mime type of documents. The libmagic is really good but sometimes it can't really detect differences between files types that are really close. And extended attributes can be used to store others informations like the encoding (utf-8, iso-8859-1, utf-16, ...) of text files.
There is already something: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-spec/ It says : > An implementation MAY also get a file's MIME type from the > user.mime_type extended attribute. The type given here should > normally be used in preference to any guessed type, since the user is > able to set it explicitly. Applications MAY choose to set the type > when saving files. Since many applications and filesystems do not > support extended attributes, implementations MUST NOT rely on this > method being available. The problem is that "many applications and filesystems do not support extended attributes". This problem occurs also when you want to send a file to someone else or when you want to store a document with extended attributes on a filesystem where extended attributes are not available. So what about creating a special file that will serialize extended attributes. So the data found in these attributes would not be lost. I had the idea that the extended attributes could be like mail or http headers. That is the name of the attribute followed by a colon ':' and the data. After all attributes there would be a blank line and the file encapsulated. The extended attributes can be also serialized in a separate file that must come with the file it refers to. So that specification would be implemented by unix commands like cp or filemanagers. Then it would permit us to use extended attributes knowing that they would be preserved and reliable. Also, what about using extended attributes to cache the guessed file type (guessed using libmagic and extension). Then when a filemanager or any other application want to know the file type, they will use this value instead of using guessing another time. I also thought that extended attributes could store the size of a directory. For example when I want to scan the filesystem with utilities like du or Baobab, they would store in extended attributes the directory size along with the time when it was measured. Afterwards, when they want to know the directory size, they could just compare the date in the extended attribute with the modification date of the folder and if they differs, measure the directory size. If not, they could just use it directly. Something else. We can imagine that files with the attribute user.xdg.title would be displayed using this title instead of the filename in file browser. Of course it should be configurable in the file browser and maybe only enabled on some folders where it is meaningful. For example i would like to be able to browse my mails using my filemanager. The mails are stored in folders, one file per mail and their filenames are just a sequantial number. I would like to be able to change the view of my filemanager in those folders so I could see the subject and sender of the mail instead of the sequential number. But of course, the file manager should still be able to display the filenames. I think the extended attributes should be better integrated in the desktop. These are just few ideas. What do you think about it ? Mildred -- Mildred <xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://mildred632.free.fr/> Clef GPG : <hkp://pgp.mit.edu> ou <http://mildred632.free.fr/gpg_key> Fingerprint : 197C A7E6 645B 4299 6D37 684B 6F9D A8D6 [9A7D 2E2B] _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
