Re: Metadata support
Re: Metadata support
- Subject: Re: Metadata support
- From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 18:02:18 -0700
I think there's been a lot of confusion here about what constitutes
"file metadata".
First off, the ownership/mode/{creation,access} time and other inode
specific data is POSIX-layer stuff and there already exist [l]stat(2)
interfaces for getting this information, so sticking it in the EA
list would be double-entry bookkeeping at best and confusing at
worst. Second, you can hardly include "3rd party housekeeping" info
like Finder's .DS_Store data in the same category since that's just
some other application's view of the file, it's not data specific to
the file itself. Another instance of that would be spotlight's index
data for the file - would you have that associated with the file
too? What about other applications? Ultimately, trying to associate
all of this goop with the file itself represents a gross layering
violation and something that's downright perilous to do for all sorts
of application / file syncing reasons I won't go into here.
What are you folks actually trying to do? Have you considered that
it might be the wrong thing? :)
- Jordan
On Jun 25, 2006, at 1:32 PM, Boyd Waters wrote:
On Jun 25, 2006, at 11:50 AM, Dan Shoop wrote:
However copyfile() doesn't seem to preserve *all* the complete,
necessary and expected data associated with Mac HFS[+] files nor
does the ._file mechanism. Specifically symlink ownership,
creation date, and file ID info for Aliases will get clobbered.
And there's also Finder information and Spotlight data stored in
the .DS_Store's
And currently (10.4.6) there appears to be no shipping tool that
can copy a file completely. ASR, hdiutil, ditto, cp (and copyfile
() reliant mechanisms) all miss something. Sometimes rather badly.
It would be nice if Apple would at least stuff the creation date
in the ._file under OS X. :(
Wow. Which is why this review of backup software found that only
*one* of all the tools available will preserve all metadata:
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/
Is there really no way to copy a file - along with *all* metadata*
- in one operation?
- boyd
Boyd Waters
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Socorro, New Mexico
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