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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

OTOH, If you want the information contained in those files, where else would you save it?

To me it seems more sensible to store information relevant only to this OS in a specific cache somewhere within that OS. It would even make cache-like functionality such as evicting old entries super easy.

There are some tradeoffs. Like if you used a usb and set up folder colours or any of the other things stored in the file, they would not move along with the usb when used on another computer.

If I set a folder colour in Finder on my work MacBook, and then plug that USB drive into my personal computer which uses Thunar as a file browser on Debian, nothing would happen.

And? If you mount a Unix file system on another system, you may see ‘invisible’ fuels whose name starts with a period, may even see weird files named “.” or “..”, may not see ACLs, and may not see any file attributes such as user and group information.

In 1970 it already was not true that one could treat all filesystems the way Unix did, but it certainly isn’t true anymore today.

> sensible to store information relevant only to this OS in a specific cache somewhere within that OS.

For most of these files, this isn’t information that can be reconstructed, so caching isn’t an option.

Also, the information has to move with the disk, if it is moved to or mounted on another system.

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