On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 05:49:04AM +1000, Andy Gayton wrote:
James Y Knight wrote:
6) Need some support in the interface for extended attributes.
There's getMetadata. That let's you return arbitrary attributes.
As a know-nothing bystander with just enough knowledge about metadata, I'm curious. Is there a way to get a list of the kinds of metadata that are available? Is there a name-spacing system so different kinds of metadata can be available under different names? For example, a WebDAV share might (should) expose a 'Content-Type' attribute on every file, so code might be written that exposes the MIME type of the file in the 'Content-Type' attribute. On the other hand, a file on an NTFS file system can have arbitarily-named bytestreams associated with it. If the NTFS VFS module exposes byte-streams under their arbitary names, a program using the VFS could try to get the content type of a file and wind up with (several gigabytes of) almost anything. Another arbitary-metadata system that would be nice to support would be POSIX extended attributes, but I don't know what the name restrictions on those would be.