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Comment by nfoz | Hacker News Reader

So, why aren't these just stored in a db or some other directory of the OS? Instead of littering the userspace, and no fs-ext required. Also it sounds like these should be per-user-and-dir instead of just per-directory.

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So that when you copy/compress/make disk image of/whatever a folder that you have customized (e.g. marked files as red or whatever or moved them in specific locations) they are as you set them when you or someone else opens them in another Mac.

Initially, because the early Mac OS X Finder was a bad enough set of compromises and slow as molasses without adding database lookups to another part of the file system (at a time when HDDs were universally spinning rust and iBooks and PowerBooks often trucked along with 4200rpm drives). The .DS_Store files could be there already in the directory and hidden from users with a flag while Apple figured out whether UFS or HFS+ was their future file system.

Now? Well I/O performance is hardly a consideration for the latest Macs, but they’re there and they work, except the Mac OS X Finder 20 years later while far better than it’s debut performance is still a load of crap so it can still forget your custom view settings for a directory.

they are only created on filesystems the OS believes cannot support metadata like you suggest

That wouldn't be a relevant condition if it always tried to use the user homedir or equivalent.

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