Post #302650

2026-02-15 01:46 UTC

I've actually spent a ridiculous amount of time tying this sort of thing into Emacs for my own uses. Doing something ad-hoc that should've been baked into everything from the start such that I wouldn't even have to think about it. It's okay if some things are just... generally distributed as a stripped down container that barely has enough information embedded within to know how to decode the rest of the data without having to literally start guessing. (Sometimes this means it's a <16 bytes header and then nothing but payload data, like many image formats.) But the filesystem has no such excuse. It is meant to manage files. It is meant to manage their metadata. It is failing to do so and nearly everything else likewise fails to do so using the filesystem, because everything has to be written with the assumption that filesystems are persistently broken and cannot store relevant metadata.

Replies (1)

@lispi314@udongein.xyz 2026-02-15 02:08

Some of you might be thinking: Isn't this what extended attributes are for? Maybe, but they don't do it well. How do you manage tags that can be arbitrary unicode strings without stepping into escape character hell? And incompatibility between programs doing the escaping? Let's say: "gray fur", "green eyes", "cat", "'Live, laugh, love' banner" as elements present in an image. This is a relatively trivial example with only common ASCII characters, spaces, quotes and commas. It gets worse. Extended attributes cannot suffice as they do not provide adequate facilities for structured metadata. Can I name a system that did it properly? Yeah, BTRON apparently did (for all its many other limitations).

Open ##302651