Re: A proposal for Summer of Code.

[James Youngman]

On 3/9/07, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray <address@hidden> wrote:

> However the current Findutils components do not look at the meta-data
> of the files on the filesystems. They only look at file names.

No, they (for example the "find" command) also look at things like
size, permissions, accessibility, sparseness, ownership, filesystem
name, and so forth.  Take a look at the manual page.


>  Moreover the presence of
> packages like GNU Libextracter
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor) make it really easy to
> extract the meta-data from various kinds of files using on a X-less
> installation. One can keep writing back-ends for handling more and
> more file types to Libextractor to broaden its support base.

I'm not familiar with that library, but the web page is not currently
working either.

> To avoid adding an extra dependency on a Libextractor-like package, we
> can make the meta-data support optional.

You still have not made clear what you mean by "meta-data".  I don't
think it is the same thing I mean by "meta-data".

> We can either modify the existing updatedb and locate tools, or write
> some separate meta-data capable components for Findutils.

Are you perhaps suggesting that "locate" be enhanced to provide more
of the tests offered by "find"?


> What do you think?

I'm not sure yet what you are suggesting.

James.