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tags by using xattr.
first of all, why tags?
did you try to organize a book or music or movie collection in a file system? what directories to create? sort by country? language? director?
with tags you can even tag as directors: woody allen and actors: woody allen.
i have been written this tool: https://github.com/norayr/etiquette
it currently only works on linux, the dependency it requires, https://github.com/norayr/xattr has only linux implementation.
but it is possible to add implementations for bsds, illumos, macos.
you can add tag to a file, delete tag, list tags of file and filter files in current directory by a tag.
https://github.com/norayr/etiquette
it https://github.com/norayr/etiquette
it
https://github.com/norayr/xattr
Oct 03 · 2 months ago · 👍 stack, mrrobinhood5
🐙 norayr [OP] · Oct 03 at 00:13:
next step maybe to add option to recursively look in underlying directories for files with given tag.
I am a little cautious: I have 100GB of mp3s with hopelessly inconsistent tags. I've given up on fixing them and only use players that use file directories.
What makes sense to you may make no sense to me. Is it 'Phil Collins' or 'Collins, Phil' or jus 'Collins' and what about Genesis? there is a meta relationship there.
Tagging taxonomies are extremely personal things and get complicated very fast. It is nearly impossible to merge different ones.
over 25 years my music collection survived being moved across many filesystem's, being dumped to tape, compressed and abused
Where do you store your tags? If external, they will get separated, lost, miscopied or get out of sync. If internal, they will be clipped at some point, unavailable on different filesystem's.
It is a fragile solution requiring a lot of work that disappears in an instant. Placing a file into a directory is not perfect but is permanent and easy, and we have more than 50 years experience and software to make it work.
With directories there is a hierarchy, it is easy to rename a directory, there is no need for any additional software, and it's mostly compatible with everything. Try creating and maintaining a hierarchy with tags. I will be eating popcorn patiently listening to Phil Collins.
To be fair xattr tags are useful in some cases. Years ago I wrote a file manager in Lisp that allowed you to change the color to the file, to keep organized. Macs used to do it an still may, I haven't touched an apple product this century.
It made sense because that kind of tagging is ephemeral anf not very important. Losing tags is no big deal. I would never trust anything important to hidden tags.
🐙 norayr [OP] · Oct 16 at 23:55:
Where do you store your tags? If external, they will get separated, lost, miscopied or get out of sync.
yes as you figured the tags are in file system. but cp -a copies the file with the tags. i also tested on nfs, and tags were working.
yes, in theory it should be easy to script and modify tags, for them to be useful.
i have no tags now. your mp3 collection had tags made by different people probably.
i tag myself. i tag films and music and books.
still i need to add recursive search in directories.
I thought I would never need to use non-linux filesystem's but over decades things come up. My partner likes Macs, smart TVs reject Linux filesystems, files get copied across networks....
🐙 norayr [OP] · Oct 23 at 00:37:
i just realized i didn't post a link to video which features how tags are used: