Hi :-) >> Also, what are the chances that someone within the FreeDOS community may >> one day write a driver for a filesystem which supports extended >> attributes? Not necessarily support for a standard filesystem (ext2, >> ext3, etc), mind you. A homebrew filesystem too would be good enough, I >> guess. > > Dunno, ask on "freedos-kernel", and be prepared to be disappointed.
You probably want to ask on freedos-devel: Filesystems, apart from the most essential bootable ones, are loadable drivers, so they are more or less like any other software, non-kernel. You have the choice between a block driver and a "network or cdrom redirector" style driver. The former is only to let the DOS kernel access FAT filesystems on non-BIOS hardware, so in your case, you want the latter. Network drives and CD/DVD/BD have filesystems about which the DOS kernel itself is totally clueless. The drivers just "generate a view" showing a tree of directories containing files with the usual DOS properties such as date and timestamp. Extra features (e.g. Unix access rights) have to be represented in DOS style or separately. The next question would be what the driver will do: As your main feature wish is "store arbitrary textual tags along with the filenames", you will probably want to add some sort of extra interface (API) to access those tags. I guess you could also "use magic": For example show virtual filename.meta text files for each filename file, to make the metadata accessible for tools which are not aware of your new interface. You could even let that dynamically switch, in case people want to copy directories with/without metas. You can provide a command line tool to control your driver. Another idea would be something like a /proc filesystem :-) This also means that the REAL question is: Which software is going to use this API and how? As mentioned in this thread, shells like the 4DOS command.com replacement can display and edit "descriptions" which are a bit like long file names. In 4DOS, descript.ion text files are used to store the metadata. As far as I know, 4DOS does not support commands like "copy all files with rollercoaster in the description to drive X:" so you actually get even LESS functionality compared to long file names where you just use verbose interesting file names. On the other hand, descript.ion files once were used in more applications, so you will probably also find file managers (in style of norton commander, dosshell or other) which can display and edit the descriptions. Maybe you will also find image viewers which support descript.ion :-) None of this will happen if you create a new driver with a new interface: That driver will ONLY let newly written software access the metadata. You can probably patch some existing software to add support for your driver to it, but that, too, is work. Maybe you could do some brainstorming and post a list with "use cases" for your metadata project: What type of tools should use the metadata and in which way? Looking forward to read your ideas :-) Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shape the Mobile Experience: Free Subscription Software experts and developers: Be at the forefront of tech innovation. Intel(R) Software Adrenaline delivers strategic insight and game-changing conversations that shape the rapidly evolving mobile landscape. Sign up now. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=63431311&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
