Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!usenet.ukfsn.org!not-for-mail From: Martin Gregorie Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: A proposal to handle file encodings Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 18:05:39 +0000 (UTC) Organization: UK Free Software Network Lines: 32 Message-ID: References: <50aed080$0$292$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 84.45.235.129 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: localhost.localdomain 1353866739 6779 84.45.235.129 (25 Nov 2012 18:05:39 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@localhost.localdomain NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 18:05:39 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Pan/0.139 (Sexual Chocolate; GIT bf56508 git://git.gnome.org/pan2) Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:19946 On Sun, 25 Nov 2012 10:18:49 +0100, Peter J. Holzer wrote: > > File attributes have existed on ext* filesystems for a very long time. > Yes, but only pretty basic ones. Here we're talking about hypothetically storing stuff like character encoding or, as I suggested, the record and key definitions for an indexed sequential file or a DBMS table. As I said, I know OSen that do this type of thing: it works well and even supports things like letting compilers access the metadata. This lets things like special C preprocessors generate #includes from it, COBOL COPY statements access it directly and ODBC/JDBC drivers to use it at runtime. > There is no file copy operation on the OS level. The kernel just sees > that a process is creating and writing a new file. It doesn't know > whether this process intends this new file to be an identical copy of > some other file. > Of course, but if the metadata is external to the file as it is in the 'other fork' in an Apple filing system, you still have to make sure that cp, mv and friends have all been rewritten to handle that. You may well find that its easier to pull metadata management into the kernel because then you've only got one piece of code to maintain rather than tweaks in umpteen utility programs and libraries. -- martin@ | Martin Gregorie gregorie. | Essex, UK org |