On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 09:37:07AM -0500, Chibby Bromanson wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 08:34:51AM +0000, Hadrien Lacour wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 09:42:51PM -0500, Chibby Bromanson wrote:
> > > Greetings,
> > >
> > > I am very impressed with the suckless software movement and I am doing
> > > my best to try to create my own tool that follows the philosophy. I
> > > still have a lot to learn with the C language but so far I am proud of
> > > the results. I would be greatful if someone would review my tool and
> > > consider it for inclusion in the list of tools that ROCK! :D
> > >
> > > The tool is for maintaining a list of descriptive tags on an extended
> > > file attribute. It plugs in nicely with fzf and other command line
> > > tools.
> > >
> > > http://github.com/bromanbro/taggins
> > >
> > > Thank you for your consideration.
> > >
> > > Dorian
> > >
> >
> > Any reason for using space as internal delimitor when it could be anything
> > that's unlikely to be used in a tag (e.g. ASCII US)?
> >
> > Although I had the same idea a long time ago, I decided that using some
> > kind of database [1] solves both the problem of xattr portability and
> > performance (no need to crawl the filesystem to get your tags).
> >
> >
> > [1] Would have to be anything with a daemon to avoid reading/writing the
> > db constantly and using a tree structure for performance reasons.
> > Said daemon could also do stuff like Windows -> POSIX and/or character
> > encoding
> > path translation if more portability is wanted.
> >
> >
> > Regards,
> > Hadrien Lacour
> >
>
> Greetings,
>
> A space is used as a delimeter primarily because tags are by nature a
> single word. And this tagging system, unlike many others, is made
> specifically to feed other command line tools while maintaining
> transparency and legibility.
>
Then I'd suggest \n: you get the same ease of use in sh, but you can have
your space.
> There are different ways to solve the problem of tagging. All the
> technologies listed above; the need for a database, a daemon to monitor
> files etc. That is why Xattribute is used. So that you do not need
> those things. Maintaining files and file information is the
> responsibility of the filesystem.
>
I understand the choice, believe me, but performance was high in my concerns
and my usecase is acting on a great number of files ("list all files with this
tag combination" or "sort this file list by tag(s)") on HDDs.
> After 12 years of Xattributes most tools and filesystems now respect
> them. Your grandfathers zip program may not but tar will.
>
For example, NFS on Linux only got support for them with 5.9. And I don't think
NetBSD/OpenBSD support it (ZFS on NetBSD might, though).
