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The Mac, Metadata, and the World
Rick Zeman writes: "ArsTechnica has posted yet another compelling article, this time on metadata, its history and the future of metadata storage as seemingly indicated by Apple in OS X. Extensions==Bad!"
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And the glaring question was: why is Linux blindly following Windows? Linux's file type handling is still in a somewhat early stage, it wouldn't be inconceivable for the paradigm to change.
Linux has traditionally not bothered very much with file type. The user generally knows what to do with the file, and does so. What look like extensions are actually just generically part of the filename; there are conventions for them, but they are no more strict than the conventions for filenames in general (Makefile is probably a makefile, README is plain text, foo.c is C source, etc.).
An important thing to realize is that file type, like, for instance, size, can be determined from looking at the data. In fact, many programs look at data files and determine the file format from the data; "file" does a pretty good job of detecting non-human-readable formats, even without knowing any information at all about the file type.
Where this all breaks down, of course, is when the user wants to omit the program name. On a Mac, you normally double-click on a data file to open it (and hope to get a program that does what you want). On *nix, you traditionally have to specify the program-- and much of the time, you select a different program depending on the desired result: for foo.c, I could use emacs, or gcc, or I might want gcc -M (get dependencies), or even wc (to see how big it is), not to mention less or grep or etags.
I think part of the Mac fascination with file type is due to the monolithic program structure; you find the file, and then you open a single program that does to it anything that you will ever do to it. In this model, there is a right program, and which program is right is based on file type. Windows clearly suffers greatly from having this model but not having a more reliable fashion of determining file type than Linux.
Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that the MacOS scheme is equivalent to having 4 character extensions which aren't displayed, with the corresponding problem of having malicious executables named README.txt (or even README)?
This isn't a problem with metadata, just a problem with MacOS' file typing.
BeOS handled all this very well. Double click to open with the default app. Right click to see a list of every program on your hard drive that opens that kind of file or files like it. (IE, a text editor would show up as an option for an HTML file.) Choose another option and open a dialog to set a file-specific preference.
I must have said "BeOS did it better" about six times today. I feel like an Amiga user.