Re: CVS, GWorkspace.app and app wrappers

[Alex Perez]

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004, Rogelio Serrano wrote:

> On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 11:46:45 +0200, Larry Cow <larry@doubidou.net> wrote:
> > Enrico Sersale a écrit :
> > 
> > > Regarding (1) and (2):
> > > The problem is that annotations and colors must be saved somewhere.
> > > But I've just started to think to a solution for the "Live Search
> > > Folders" I'm writing and the annotations could be saved in the same
> > > place.
> > > Perhaps I'll use libdb with a btree access method but I'm not sure.
> > > Any suggestion?
> > 
> > Instead of libdb, maybe we could look into SQLite. But that's almost the
> > same idea.
> > 
> > Another way of managing this could be te rely on filesystem's extended
> > attributes. Most currents ones are supporting this, even if it's not
> > enabled by default. What about trying to use (optionnaly) this kind of
> > feature?

Please quote properly so I don't have to do it for you...
> 
> Yup libdb is a good idea. Enlightenment used libdb2.7 and built a
> whole transaction and logging layer on top of it for all their disk
> bound data. Im just a little worried of having separate metadata and
> file data. What if the file was deleted and the metadata is not? Would
> the synchronization be complex?

Potentially. I think the EA route is a better long-term solution, but it 
has its own set of problems. It appears that FreeBSD also has EA support 
(as well as ACL support, which is built on top of the EA support) I cannot 
vouch for the other BSDs. Having a fallback mechanism might be a good 
idea, but it comes down to how much time it will take to code both versus 
just one. 

> 
> Im not sure about extended attributes. You need to build a layer to
> handle it. It will not work outside linux though. Is anybody using
> gworkspace on windows?

No, to the best of my knowledge. For several reasons: I don't think anyone 
would want to, and I also don't think anyone's even bothered to see if it 
compiled under Windows. *VERY* few GUI apps are being used under Windows 
at the moment, mainly due to the fact that the apps look totally out of 
place in a windows environment, and also due to the fact that the GDI 
windows backend isn't the best thing in the world yet.
 
> Why not just put everything in directories like the .apps? That way we
> have a flexible metadata system and everything stays together. It will
> be slow though.
Yes, potentially very.