On 2021-08-12, Hope Rouselle <[email protected]> wrote: >> OS/2 had all kinds of amazing features (for its time). [...] Plus, >> it had this fancy concept of "extended attributes"; on older >> systems (like MS-DOS's "FAT" family), a file might be Read-Only, >> Hidden, a System file, or needing to be Archived, and that was it - >> but on HPFS, you could attach arbitrary data like "File type: >> DeScribe Word Processor" or "Double click action: Run >> CASMake.cmd". This allowed the GUI to store all kinds of >> information *on the file itself* instead of needing hidden files >> (or, in Windows' case, the registry) to track that kind of thing. > > Yeah, that's kinda nice. Isn't that a UNIX design? A file is a > sequence of bytes? Users decide what to put in them?
I think what he's talking about is allowing the user to attach arbitrary _metadata_ to the file -- metadata that exists separately and independently from the normal data that's just a "sequence of bytes". IOW, something similar to the "resource fork" that MacOS used to have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork > So OS/2 was taking advantage of that to integrate it well with the > system. Windows was doing the same, but integrating the system with > files in odd ways --- such as a registry record to inform the system > which programs open which files? (That does sound more messy.) Windows never had filesystems that supported metadata like OS/2 and MacOS did. The registry was an ugly hack that attempted (very poorly) to make up for that lack of metadata. > UNIX's execve() is able to read the first line of an executable and > invoke its interpreter. I guess OS/2 was doing precisely that in a > different way? No, that's not at all the same thing. The #! line is part of the normal file data. It's part of the 'sequence of bytes'. Metadata maintained by Unix filesystems comprises a very limited and pre-defined set of attributes present in the inode. -- Grant -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
