On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 05:45:57PM -0400, Ilya Zakharevich wrote:
On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 05:43:07PM -0400, Ronald J Kimball wrote:
That's what some newer file systems allow to achieve: green bits. On
*nixish systems each file has a "contents", and several additional
bits (which are not intermixed with context in any way), like
timestamps and permission bits. "Green bits" are additional arbitrary
bits of data which you may associate to a file, but which do not show
in "contents" (there is a separate API to access them).
Sort of like the resource fork in a Macintosh file, perhaps?
I do not know what goes into the resource fork. What I've heard
indicates it is like attaching a scalar to a file, not a hash to a
file. (Or, what is the same, attaching a hash with one key 'resource'.
;-)
Not sure what you're heard... It's more like attaching a hash. There are
innumerable resource types that can appear in a file's resource fork, both
standard and defined by the developer. Then, each resource type can
contain numerous resources. So it's more like attaching a hash of
anonymous arrays.
Actually, the creator and file types and things like permissions,
visibility, etc. aren't stored in the resource fork or the data fork, but
in the file info part (there must be some technical name for that part of
the file :). I guess that would be the more appropriate analogy, rather
than the resource fork, to what you describe.
Ronald
