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“Xerox PARC file-system designs grappled with this problem [whether to put file information inside or outside] as far back as the 1970s. They had an ‘open serialized’ call that returned a byte stream containing
both attributes and content. If applied to a directory, it returned a serialization of the directory’s attributes plus the serialization of all the files in it. It is not clear that this approach has ever been bettered.” [“The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric
Raymond, page 467.] Michael Kay says: “If it was layered the way protocols are layered, then there would be one layer at which the metadata is visible as part of the file content, and another layer at which you only see the
content.” Michael, I am not clear on what you are suggesting. Is the layered protocol approach the same as the Xerox approach? /Roger |