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Re: Metadata support

Quinton,

In a nutshell, what the average Mac user expects is for a file's metadata (eg, comments, tags, colours, groups, keywords, etc), regardless what application it's related to, to be preserved when it gets moved/copied/backed up no matter where it ends up.

while I pretty much agree with you, I guess we need to be a bit more precise. IMO, you're preaching to the choir (or barking up the wrong tree, depending on how you see it): The Darwin team has done everything to make the standard BSD tools support HFS+ extended attributes, and it works great (except some regression in 10.4.6's ASR, and outdated tools such as ditto and CpMac). Finder also copies EAs.

An entirely unrelated question is what to do with the EAs, and that's certainly not in the hands of the Darwin folks. Everything is in place, and I, too, think that applications should make widespread use of EAs to store metadata such as tags, categories, etc., because a user would expect to have that information attached to a file and not buried in some application-specific database (speaking, for example, of the "black hole" that iPhoto libraries are). So Apple should definitely be encouraged to be a role model in this sense with their iApps. But I don't even think they can be blamed for not using EAs extensively in Tiger, because it would certainly have been negligent to use a freshly introduced API until it has matured and until there is a wide user base that supports these APIs. With Leopard, however, I would certainly hope that EAs will actually be put to use. Standardized methods for tagging and attaching metadata attributes in combination with Spotlight - that has the potential for being hugely useful.

Again, that's all not a matter of Darwin or the BSD tools - the homework is done there.

Cheers,

Moritz
--
http://www.plasticsfuture.org
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