Bundles, a draft specification

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 12:51 +0200, Mildred wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> Le Mon 03/09/2007 à 10:23 Alexander Larsson à écrit:
> > On Sun, 2007-09-02 at 12:20 +0200, Mildred wrote:
> > > 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.)
> 
> I don't think it is a bad idea just because of that. Mac OS X has it and
> I think it is a great idea because files are still accessible and there
> is no overhead for unpacking files. And if we want to change a file in
> the bundle, it is easier.

MacOS has kernel support for this (a flag in the filesystem for
bundles).