Re: Resource forks and such

Jens-Uwe Mager (jum@ra.han.de)
8 Jul 1999 23:22:27 GMT


On Thu, 8 Jul 1999 21:52:56 GMT, allbery@kf8nh.apk.net <allbery@kf8nh.apk.net> wrote:
>On 8 Jul, Jens-Uwe Mager wrote:
>+-----
>| On Tue, 6 Jul 1999 22:22:39 GMT, allbery@kf8nh.apk.net
>| <allbery@kf8nh.apk.net> wrote:
>| >On 6 Jul, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>| >| 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
>| >
>| >That said, the problem with storing the metadata with the file is that
>| >on a multiuser OS different people may want different associations,
>| >different icons, etc.for the same file. So it has to be stored per
>| >user, not per file. Also, how do you assign icons to files which are
>|
>| I think not, the way document types work these should not be changed on a per
>| user basis. For example, if you would store a mime type with each document,
>| then a GIF image will get image/gif and as long as the file is not rewritten
>| to contain something else its meta data should definitely be the same.
>+--->8
>
>The example given (which I clipped; I should have left it) was an icon,
>which is indeed stored in an EA on OS/2. That's the sort of thing that
>has no business being stored with the file on Unix (including Linux).
>
>NB: OS/2 will also get an icon for an executable file from a .ICO file
>with the same root-name in the same directory. That one would work
>fairly well on Linux.

Well, the Mac does not store icons with every file in the general case,
it just stores the type and creator codes, which is similar to a mime
type thing. The icons itself are stored in the desktop database.

But there is an exception on the Mac that I use quite often: There is
a custom icon attribute that allows one to have a customized icon for
each individual file, This comes handy if you have a directory full of
images (for example JPEG's from your digital camera) and each icon is
not the generic JPEG icon but a thumbnail of the original. If you have
the thumbnail in the same file as the JPEG, all file management will
affect the thumbnail as well (move, copy ...).

-- 
Jens-Uwe Mager	<pgp-mailto:62CFDB25>

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