Moving Baloo forward

[Thomas Lübking]

On Dienstag, 21. Januar 2014 13:37:29 CEST, vivo75 at gmail.com wrote:

> And windows?

HPFS/NTFS has xattr support (through alternative data streams) and WINNT supports handling xattr on FAT as well.

The problem about xattr is rather that 99% of all ext3/4 users will atm get

   setfattr: <filename>: Operation not supported

ie. xattr nowhere being activated.
This would have to change dramatically in order to make a xattr implementation useful.

Next thing is global xattr awareness, ie. one has to consider that even if kio/dolphin would have great xattr support and cp aliasing -a by default etc., the user might move/copy the data using nautilus or some other lousy filemanager :-P

I *do* consider xattr the BY FAR more sane approach to the problem, but currently do frankly not see this on end user desktops :-(
Linux/Desktop has to become a "xattr OS" before relying on it - thus imo xattr support could only be explicitly optional to get there.
Otherwise ubuntusers™ will complain loosing their metadata all the time.
"Unfortunately" this isn't MacOS where SJ. just said: "do or you're fired, you <censored>!"


Keeping metadata in id3v2/xmp/iptc unfortunately only covers few filetypes (w/o invoking sidecars, ie. what __MACOSX does when entering the outer world) - directories could be stored in ".directory"

Cheers,
Thomas