Re: [dev] Suckless operating system

On 6/14/10, Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57_AT_fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> On 15 Jun 2010, at 00:28, Antoni Grzymala wrote:
>
>> Bjartur Thorlacius dixit (2010-06-14, 23:24):
>>
>>> On 6/14/10, Matthew Bauer <mjbauer95_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I wish modern filesystems would allow some way of identifying a
>>>> file type
>>>> besides in the filename. It seems like that would make things more
>>>> straight
>>>> forward.
>>
>>> Surely many modern filesystem support xattrs (extended file
>>> attributes)?
>>> One should be able to use them to store media types.
>
> Should, or will?
WDYM? AFAIK ext4, Reiserfs, ZFS (if that's categorized as a FS), btrfs
and others support xattr /if/ properly configured. OTOH I think they're
disabled by default on many distros. Any examples of filesystems that
don't support them besides NFS?
> I get the impression storing file type information was much more
> common in the past, which raises the question why is it not now? I
> think it's pointless because most file types can be identified from
> their first few bytes. This loops back around to my content-type
> argument, why should the server go looking for file type when the
> client gets it handed to it anyway?
Not all media types contain magic numbers. In theory one could just
wrap all files in a metadata container that would allow for seperation of
"static" metadatata about files seperately from transfer info (such as
Date and Transfer-*), but that would require long transition period and
standardization on a new Content-Encoding that may become default
in, say, HTTP/2.0 and get some basic support in MS IE 11 or 12.

P.S. When I say "wrapper" I mean something like an shebang/PS style
header like #=text/html.

--
kv,
  - Bjartur