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BeFS's metadata support was much different from usual—it was a key/value map attached to each file. NTFS supports extended attributes and alternate data streams
by PeCaN 10y ago
BeFS's metadata support was much different from usual—it was a key/value map attached to each file. NTFS supports extended attributes and alternate data streams, which you could use to do the same thing, but none of the *nix filesystems have anything like that. What sort of metadata do you mean with “almost every filesystem ‘supports metadata’”?
- acdha 10y agoJFS, XFS, ReiserFS, ext3/4, and btrfs all support extended attributes – that's become a bigger deal for things like ACLs – but along with varying size limits the share the same limitations as NTFS, HFS+, etc. of not indexing those values. That means there's no way to do a query like "file type = audio/mp3" without either walking the filesystem or querying a separate index, which removes a lot of the benefits.
- PeCaN 10y agoI think NTFS can index alternate data streams¹, but yeah, I agree no filesystems are on the level that BeFS was of easy querying and versatility. ¹ I am not sure about this, but https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa364404(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... seems to suggest it
- acdha 10y agoI'm not sure either – it definitely did not in the past but I haven't needed to look into it for years. Things like WinFS were going to solve that the right way but since that never shipped I assume they were still relying on a bolt-on indexing service.