Re: what are .sdk archives?

[Gregory Weston <uce@splook.com>]

In article <eJDej.1274$nN5.76@trndny04>,
 "Charlie" <charlieDOTd@verEYEzon.net> wrote:

> > But getting back to what I said above, that leads to either a
> > potentially huge amount of user interaction or a lot of OS magic to
> > maintain the relationship. To me it's very suboptimal for the user to
> > see, in addition to their foo.txt file, an unbounded collection of other
> > files named foo.txt-xattr-SenderName, foo.txt-xattr-SenderAddr,
> > foo.txt-xattr-Subject, etc. (It may not even be possible, given that we
> > have to deal with limits on the lengths of both filenames and full paths
> > in most extant file systems today.) Just having them there buries signal
> > under noise. To then either require that the user rename the files, copy
> > them en masse or whatever *or* have the OS do so those manipulations
> > implicitly just aggravates the situation.
> 
> Suboptimal yes, but in my mind better than forks.

Why, though? Why is it better for the user (and for that matter code 
traversing the file hierarchy) to have to wade through potentially 
hundreds of extra files they will never care about in order to find the 
single data file they actually want to manipulate in any given situation?

G