file attributes

[David G. Paschich]

In article <1743 at sranha.sra.co.jp> erik at sra.co.jp, 
	(Erik M. van der Poel) writes:

   It is almost possible to create a Mac-like interface on Unix, but this
   involves incredibly convoluted methods such as keying off of the name
   of the file, or checking the contents of the file for certain known
   properties of an application's files. Again, there are no standards in
   this area. Unix needs to be extended to allow attaching all sorts of
   attributes to files. The inode is not extensible.

[stuff removed by dgp]

   So we need a new system call, say, mopen(), which opens a file that
   contains attributes such as the application name. This would allow old
   programs to continue to use open() to access the data itself. The
   stat() call would also be left unchanged. The size of the attributes
   file could be determined by calling fstat() on the file descriptor
   returned by mopen().

I think a better solution than extending the Unix file system in this
way would be to create a file, named say .desktop (or something more
clever to avoid lawsuits :) which would contain this information, and
then writing some library calls which would maintain this information
and make it available to programs.  This also makes the code a lot
more portable since it doesn't rely on the particular Unix providing
the facilities you describe.

--
David G. Paschich	Open Computing Facility		UC Berkeley
dpassage at ocf.berkeley.edu
"Can Spam increase sexual potency?  `No!' say scientists!" -- Trygve Lode