Bundles, a draft specification

[Alexander Larsson]

On Sun, 2007-09-02 at 12:20 +0200, Mildred wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I sent a message a while ago on this list about bundles without having
> an answer. So I finally created a draft specification for this.
> 
> http://mildred817.free.fr/Misc/Computer/Ideas/Spec/Bundles.html
> http://mildred817.free.fr/Misc/Computer/Ideas/Spec/Bundles/Bookmark_Bundle.html
> http://mildred817.free.fr/Misc/Computer/Ideas/Spec/Bundles/Metadata_Bundle.html
> Please excuse the language ...
> 
> Bundles are directories that contains others files. And these
> directories (called bundles) are to be handled differently by files
> managers than usual directories, more like files.

This is a bad idea due to the following:

        A bundle can be detected by the presence of the file named
        types.bundle in a directory. The file being a text-file (lines
        being separated by ASCII character 10, LF) whose first lines
        begins with the ASCII character 1 and whose second line begins
        by BT, followed by a tabulator, by the string inode/bundle and
        the line feed.
        
This means that to detect the type of a directory one must do a stat
inside it, which can be very costly when there are many directories. For
instance, gnome has disabled cheching for ".directory" desktop files in
directories for this reasons (except in a few specific locations).

(Also, something like glick is more likely to work everywhere since it
requires no special handling in the file-manager.)