Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th May 2010 10:03 UTC, submitted by robertson
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RE[5]: Making progresses, but...
by StephenBeDoper on Tue 11th May 2010 17:08
in reply to "RE[4]: Making progresses, but..."
Okay, if I understand well it is something like OS-managed metadata. Sounds pretty nice, though I wonder how well it would scale if millions of attributes were to appear in various applications with time...
Attributes do add some overhead - E.g. emptying the trash with a large number of files often takes longer than it does on other OSes, because the attributes have to be deleted too (and not just the files). But, IME, the benefits outweigh the costs.




Member since:
2010-03-08
The three best-known examples of practical uses are managing contact/address book data, EMail messages, and audio files. So, for example, the filemanager can display columns like track number, artist, title, year, etc for audio files - essentially giving you iTunes-esque functionality, except at the OS level.
So, yes, it does help with search - but there's quite a bit more to it as well. Attributes, queries, etc, are as a fundamental to the way Haiku works as piping and redirection are to the UNIX shell - and, in fact, they're used for many of the same purposes (allowing applications to be small and focused, while still being able to share data & communicate via standardized means).
Okay, if I understand well it is something like OS-managed metadata. Sounds pretty nice, though I wonder how well it would scale if millions of attributes were to appear in various applications with time...