Bundles, a draft specification

[Joe Mason]

On 9/10/07, Mildred <ml.mildred593 at online.fr> wrote:
> You're right. Maybe there is no point trying to create such artificial
> structure. But the major problem to extended attributes, is that if you
> copy/move a file which has such attributes to a filesystem that do not
> support them, they are discarded.
>
> Maybe the solution is to define bundles by the extended attributes it
> has, and any bundle-aware system MUST transform that bundle into a zip
> bundle if it is copied/moved to a foreign filesystem that do not
> support extended attributes.

I think instead we should pick a mechanism for storing extended
attributes on filesystems that don't support them natively (hidden
metadata files, for instance) and have "metadata aware" tools that
will transparently convert to and from this representation.  (If we
clone what Mac does, we get the advantage that we can make sense of
some of the Mac metadata, and vice versa.) Bundles would then just be
a specific case of this.  This would be useful for users of metadata
even if they don't care for bundles at all.

Joe