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Comment by iggldiggl

5 days ago

I think Apple's implementation in macOS is the only one that offers some slightly more advanced features, but even those don't get you that far

(Some sort of way to store permission references with relatives paths in a file, but which most probably wouldn't work with files being exchanged cross-platform, and other than that mainly being able to get automatic access to 'related' files, i.e. same file name, but a differing extension – that solves some sidecar files, like video subtitles, or certain kinds of georeferenced images, but large capability gaps still remain – even the video subtitle example stops working if the file name is no longer 100 % the same, like if you have multiple subtitle files for differing languages, where VLC for example supports prefix-matching the video file name with the subtitle files.)

And while your idea does have its merits, I fear that pretty soon you still hit a point where you can't sensibly and succinctly display those more complex types of permissions in the UI.

> And while your idea does have its merits, I fear that pretty soon you still hit a point where you can't sensibly and succinctly display those more complex types of permissions in the UI.

I could very well be wrong, but my inclination is that it's possible, but it's going to take the sort of fundamentals R&D that desktop operating systems haven't seen in decades. It can't just be tacked on, everything to be designed with this new system in mind.