extended attribute standardization

[Claes at work]

Hi,

I created the CommonExtendedAttributes page a while ago, and I welcome
a discussion on how xattrs can be put to good use.

> 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.

I think one thing that makes xattrs somewhat special is that it is not
usually the actual applications that save files that benefit from the
setting attributes. I think that is why they seem to be used so
rarely. It would be other apps, like file managers and indexers - if
enough files were saved with common metadata as extended attributes.

> 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.

Exactly. Some of these examples are proposed on the wiki page
(user.xdg.origin.url, user.xdg.origin.email.subject etc), but I would
be interested to hear of more ideas.

> 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.

I think the current wiki page is a good start, and hopefully it will
eventually inspire developers to add these attributes to files they
save. How easy would it be to add xattr support to desktop frameworks
(KDE/Gnome) and get many applications to support some basic attributes
 automatically? Is it something that can be added to common file
dialogs for example?

Claes