Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: give us a hand with arch

[Tom Lord]

    > From: David Brown <address@hidden>

    > What if we made the format of the tags more "universal", something that
    > could conceivably by used by systems other than arch.

    > Perhaps:

    >  <punct> file-id: "text" <punct>

    > or even something that makes it stand out more.  That might help make it
    > clear that the file tag isn't really an arch thing, it is just that arch
    > is the only thing that can do anything useful with it.

    > Other systems make use of unique id's for files or other pieces of data.
    > Uuids get fairly common use these days.  I don't know if we want to
    > restrict the id's to a 64 bit integer, though.


There's no technical obstacle to doing that at all.

Which is really the problem.  `inventory' tends to be at very high
risk for creeping featurism mostly because there's no technical
obstacle to adding new parameters and variations.

So, it's _perhaps_ a fine thing to do but shouldn't be done just
because the idea is there.  There needs to be a definate (rather than
speculative) practical consequence.

-t