Hi, On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 02:31 +0100, Vegard Nossum wrote: > I would like to propose a more formal discussion around the standarization > of attribute names and usage, which could eventually lead to a draft or > memo of sorts (freedesktop standard, RFC, etc). Is anybody interested in > participating in such a project? If so, I believe that we should set up a > project webside, a dedicated mailing list, and a version-controlled > document containing the current work. It would probably also be useful to > have an index of programs utilizing extended attributes, plus any patches > for existing programs.
I think the idea is a good one, but I feel that it's somewhat premature to create a big deal around something that virtually nobody uses at this point. It's up for application developers to decide how they want to use extended attributes, and it's been my experience that trying to define standards before there are any real users or use-cases ultimately leads to an incomplete and ineffectual document. Beagle's uses of extended attributes are largely for its own internal accounting. They tell us whether the file has been indexed and if the index representation is up to date. More interesting uses for xattrs in my mind would be for mail programs to associate attachments saved to disk back to the original email; for browsers to associated saved documents to the web page they were downloaded from; tagging of files seems to make sense to me in xattrs; and things of that nature. Essentially external metadata on a document which doesn't natively support that kind of metadata. If http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes is accurate in the coverage of xattr use out there, there are *three* applications using them today: Beagle, ROX contact manager, and an Apache module. Deciding how best to use xattrs and advocating their use with other developers seems like a more important first step than setting up wikis and mailing lists. Joe _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg