> One thing I stopped short on saying in my first email was this; Can any
> one person name no less that five things that cannot be done (or would be
> terribly ugly to do) with the status quo, but could be done with a kernel
> assisted 'albod' hack? I've yet to see many potential applications for
> this.
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but on OS/2 these 'albods' (called
EAs) were not used for compound documents but they were used to store
non-critical 'metadata' about files. With OS/2 you could give a different
icon to each of your .c files by sticking it in an EA, that icon would
stay associated with that file even if you moved it around outside of the
GUI. AFIAK there is no other way to acheive that without using a
filesystem extension, all other techniques I have heard of break unless
you use special tools.
Some other examples:
- Image viewers can store thumbnails in the albod not in ~/.eeyes
- MP3 players can store the song name and maybe other information
- GUI file browsers can store icon, association and other information
- FTP clients can store the originating site and download date of
transfered files
Note that this is quite a different perspective than the compound document
discussion - I'm not certain Linux needs to have this (it sounds nifty but
I never used it very much), but it is a neat little use.
Jason
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