support metadata from extended filesystem attributes

[Raphaël Droz]

Tagging currently only relies on mutagen.
It restricts tagging to the subset of media files which support metadata, known by mutagen.

It should possible to tag any (regular) file of a filesystem which supports extended attributes.
(most of modern filesystems nowadays)

I though about the following implementation:

- an abstract class (following pytagsfs.metastore.mutagen.MutagenFileMetaStore) would define the following methods: tags_class, extract, inject, ...

- an alternative to mutagen.MutagenFileMetaStore would implements the methods above.

- an option to specify the tagging method to use may be offered.
The xattr method would be activated if the filesystem is mounted with the "user_xattr" or "xattr" attributes and the user asked for it.
Both "file-based" and "file-system-based" methods may be used together (or in conjunction) if needed.

listing, adding, removing tags would then internally use the xattr utils.
A python module exists to ease this task; dev-python/pyxattr

[Forest Bond (forest-bond)]

Hi Raphaël,

pytagsfs already has a base class similar to what you describe. It's called "MetaStore" and it's defined in metastore/__init__.py.

You can implement support for storing and retrieving source filesystem extended attributes by sub-classing MetaStore and implementing the "get" and "set" methods. I would be happy to review such a contribution for inclusion in pytagsfs.

You can tell pytagsfs to use your MetaStore implementation with command-line option "-o metastores=pytagsfs.metastore.foo.FooMetaStore" (i.e. use a full Python dotted path specifying where to load the class from).

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Forest

[Raphaël Droz (raphael-droz)]

Metastore supporting extended attributes attached