some problems for an introductory python test

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 5:03 AM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2021-08-12, Hope Rouselle <hrouselle at jevedi.com> wrote:
>
> >> OS/2 had all kinds of amazing features (for its time). [...] Plus,
> >> it had this fancy concept of "extended attributes"; on older
> >> systems (like MS-DOS's "FAT" family), a file might be Read-Only,
> >> Hidden, a System file, or needing to be Archived, and that was it -
> >> but on HPFS, you could attach arbitrary data like "File type:
> >> DeScribe Word Processor" or "Double click action: Run
> >> CASMake.cmd". This allowed the GUI to store all kinds of
> >> information *on the file itself* instead of needing hidden files
> >> (or, in Windows' case, the registry) to track that kind of thing.
> >
> > Yeah, that's kinda nice.  Isn't that a UNIX design?  A file is a
> > sequence of bytes?  Users decide what to put in them?
>
> I think what he's talking about is allowing the user to attach
> arbitrary _metadata_ to the file -- metadata that exists separately
> and independently from the normal data that's just a "sequence of
> bytes". IOW, something similar to the "resource fork" that MacOS used
> to have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork

Correct. OS/2's EAs are name/value pairs (with the value potentially
being a set of values - think how a Python dict maps keys to values,
but the values could be lists), with a few names having significance
to the system, like .TYPE and .LONGNAME (used on file systems that
didn't support longnames - yes, that's possible, since EAs could be
stored in a hidden file on a FAT disk).

> > So OS/2 was taking advantage of that to integrate it well with the
> > system.  Windows was doing the same, but integrating the system with
> > files in odd ways --- such as a registry record to inform the system
> > which programs open which files?  (That does sound more messy.)
>
> Windows never had filesystems that supported metadata like OS/2 and
> MacOS did. The registry was an ugly hack that attempted (very poorly)
> to make up for that lack of metadata.

Very poor indeed - it was very very common back then for Windows
programs to blat themselves all over the registry and then leave it
all behind when you nuke that thing. With EAs, it's all part of the
file itself and will be cleaned up by a simple directory removal.

ChrisA