file attributes

[Marcus J. Ranum]

erik at srava.sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel) writes:

>The reason I brought this up in comp.unix.wizards, is because I want
>to discuss how we could integrate this metadata idea into Unix.

	The first step is to discuss possible options, and to try to
abstract a general solution. It's not a question of "how we could[...]"
it's a question of "should we[...]?" and whether it needs to be integrated
into UNIX or application layer, or whatnot. I don't think the justifications
you've given for why we *need* a new system call are very clear or very
solid. The "how" and the "getting it into POSIX" part come later. (Unless
you're one of the increasing population that seems to feel that standards
should be set in concrete without a decent set of trial implementations
and some discussion - if you are, I can't help you).

	Barry Shein's idea of environment variables for files is extremely
elegant and would probably be useful in a lot of ways - it would rightly
require that the application have "brains" about file types, rather than
the kernel, but would make it a lot easier for them to do so.

mjr.