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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: Moving away from app-centric mimetypes (e.g. kword)
From:       Allan Sandfeld Jensen <snowwolf () one2one-networks ! com>
Date:       2002-05-16 0:09:42
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On Wednesday 15 May 2002 23:17, Brad Hards wrote:
> The first part of this comes across as condescending.
>
> You might be able to do a userspace filesystem, and mount it using the
> loopback interface, but it would still need some kernel support.
>
> In any case, we can implement it without a full virtual filesystem, and get
> most of the functionality required. In any case, it would allow the
> userspace presentation (which should be mostly indpendent of the underlying
> implementation) to be determined. That is a more useful thing to be
> discussing in any case (especially on a look'n'feel list)
>
Well, my basic argument is that filesystems are not offered directly by the 
kernel. They are offered by libraries that just happen to use the kernel on 
operating systems with a monolithic kernel. If we want extra features like 
extended attributes, we are already breaking or at least extending the posix 
filesystem interface, and migth as well make a new and better one.
 If we have such a new interface and it either was backwards compatible or it 
becomes defacto standard, we have what we want; a transparent extension to 
already existing filesystems. 

Ofcouse there are advantages of placing metadata-support in the kernel, most 
notable instant transparancy. The disadvantage is that it would take a decade 
before we could even assume most linux' installation used such a FS, (and 
before that possible longer to even convince the kernel-hackers that such a 
feature belongs in the kernel. )

To place the metadata in separate files in a directory is not much different 
from wrapping the files, it will look odd to 3rdparty applications and 
metadata would not survive to move through such applications.

The best thing I guess, would be to implement something simple with a 
welldefined standard. It might also be wise to make it look like something 
independ from KDE, that we just "happen" to like and thus implement. 
Hopefully other non-KDE applications will then implement the same standard.

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