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xattrs can certainly be used to store tagging info. There are a couple major problems with them though. 1) xattrs are not supported by all file systems and they
by didgetmaster 5y ago
xattrs can certainly be used to store tagging info. There are a couple major problems with them though. 1) xattrs are not supported by all file systems and they are not enabled by default in some. If you copy a file with xattrs from one file system to another that either doesn't support them or didn't enable their use, then your xattrs are thrown away in the copy. 2)Searching for files based on xattrs in a large folder tree (e.g. several million files across thousands of folders) is exceptionally slow by nature.
- em-bee 5y agoright, but the alternative is no support for tags at all, so xattr gets us halfway there, and filesystems that don't have it need to keep up. searching can be sped up by building an index. apps that want to use tags will need to do that, just like they build an index of files already. because searching filenames is also slow. a version of locatedb that supports xattr would help for example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search