Re: [dev] Suckless operating system

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?

> Besides, hfs has had this feature (along with the whole data/resource
> fork schizophreny) for the last 15 or twenty years.

I think hfs only has that feature for backwards compatibility, I
haven't seen any sign of its use in Mac OS X.

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?

-- 
Complexity is not a function of the number of features. Some features  
exist only because complexity was _removed_ from the underlying system.