[Wasabi] Kicking of the Metadata spec - brainstorm

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2007/2/20, Joe Shaw <joeshaw at novell.com>:
>
>
> Indeed, and we should also use the same storage for it whenever
> possible.  I envision a three-tiered system for actually setting
> metadata on files:
>
> 1. Store the metadata in the file itself whenever possible.  Things like
> id3 tags in MP3s or XMP metadata in jpegs.  This is ideal because it's
> in a standardized format that most tools can read, and the metadata
> follows the file around no matter where it's sent.
>
> 2. Store metadata in extended attributes on the file in the file system.
> This has the benefit in that the metadata follows the data around within
> a single system, and our desktop applications can be standardized around
> a schema for xattrs.  Obviously this won't work for non-file items or on
> file systems that don't support them.
>
> 3. Lastly, store metadata in some sort of centralized store, like a
> sqlite database.  Keeping metadata in sync with data is harder, but
> fortunately most of the data that would require this mechanism wouldn't
> have mostly unique URIs.  I'm sure Jamie will disagree with me on this,
> but I don't think this requires a constantly running daemon; a simply
> library interface would probably suffice.


Allow me to pick up on 3. :-)

How would you manage locks on the db? Was synchronization issues not the
reason why leaftag wasn't successful? I mean if you can't keep file tags
synchronized then you are unlikely to succeed in keeping general metadata up
to date...

Cheers,
Mikkel
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20070220/6d554f84/attachment.htm