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Ars Technica did a retrospective on the BeOS filesystem[1] which may help explain things. The tl;dr of it is that the filesystem is the canonical database that

Ars Technica did a retrospective on the BeOS filesystem[1] which may help explain things. The tl;dr of it is that the filesystem is the canonical database that all applications can use and query without any special domain specific knowledge. I'm not up to date with how MacOS works so it's possible they've added a layer on top of the filesystem which works similarly. However, I do know that Windows is nowhere near that level, mainly because it's encouraged for metadata to be stored in file specific ways. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-b...

sirn 9y ago
On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time). AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.
- oneplane 9y ago
  No, that's only part of the story. Early on, they were using resource forks for data but metadata as well. Then they moved to filesystem attributes and those just grew. You can have tags in there, as well as text, icons, settings etc. It's pretty standardized, but on top of that, you can use Spotlight metadata too, both in the EA as well ans the V100 DB.
JoBrad 9y ago
Using a structure other than the file to store information about the file seems like a big problem (like the iTunes example Josh used). It's inherently not portable. Even if the OS took extra steps to copy the additional data along with the file, that still replies on the target OS to recognize the additional file(s), and incorporate it into whatever search functionality it has. Supporting the tags or metadata in the file simplifies things quite a bit.

sirn 9y ago

On the Mac, the metadata is stored in a file (inside /.Spotlight-V100) rather than inside the filesystem (a la BeOS File System). An application can provide Spotlight Importer that can extract metadata from a file during index (this is why mdimport is taking a lot of CPU time). AFAIK, this approach is contrary to the BeOS approach, where application write the metadata directly. Spotlight's approach do have few benefits, though, such as able to provide metadata for files in network drives, or for removable disks that might not be using filesystem that supports metadata.

oneplane 9y ago
No, that's only part of the story. Early on, they were using resource forks for data but metadata as well. Then they moved to filesystem attributes and those just grew. You can have tags in there, as well as text, icons, settings etc. It's pretty standardized, but on top of that, you can use Spotlight metadata too, both in the EA as well ans the V100 DB.

JoBrad 9y ago

Using a structure other than the file to store information about the file seems like a big problem (like the iTunes example Josh used). It's inherently not portable. Even if the OS took extra steps to copy the additional data along with the file, that still replies on the target OS to recognize the additional file(s), and incorporate it into whatever search functionality it has. Supporting the tags or metadata in the file simplifies things quite a bit.