pending file primitives (EH?)

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Fri May 25 18:03:00 UTC 2001


"Noel J. Bergman" <noel at devtech.com> is widely believed to have written:

> >> Are we missing something at the [file] primitive layer?
> > A decent way to handle file attributes such as type/creator/permissions.
> 
> But how do you describe this in a way that is portable between Unix file
> permissions and SMB (Samba, Win32, OS/2) ACLs?
Dunno, which is why I simply asked for it instead of suggesting how to
do it.

At the simplest level I would just like to see it being possible to get
the files attributes (whatever may be applicable to any particular
platform) in some manner (maybe just a ByteArray so there is no
expectation of user visible semantic content) and then be able to apply
them to another file (typically the copy I've just made in another
place) in the most sensible manner we can come up with. I suspect that
there are reasonably useful treatments of permissions we can make
portable, but doubt that type/creator stuff could be dealt with cross
platform. Maybe, just maybe, some sort of MIMEtype mapping can be done
sometimes.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Renewable energy source for hot air balloons.





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