Longhorn – Coming soon to a Mac near you?

The other day, I stumbled across a very interesting piece of insider info, titled “ Sources hint at forthcoming Mac OS X Technologies”. It’s basically some rumours about “Tiger”, the upcoming release 10.4 of Mac OS X from Apple.

The following part caught my eye immediately – that’d just be plain wonderful:

Metadata Support#

Nevertheless, one rumour which dates back to last October states that Apple has been working on a metadata enabled database file system. Essentially, metadata is “data about data,” and includes data associated with either an information system or an information object for purposes of description, administration, legal requirements, technical functionality, use and preservation.

Apparently, it is not clear yet if this really will happen, but the following paragraph is not-so-bad either:

It’s unclear if Apple has proceeded with plans to incorporate this technology into Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” or if it has been diverted in favor of a later version of the Mac OS. However, it has been confirmed that Apple is striving to release a new file system before the debut of Microsoft’s Longhorn OS.

My personal guess is, that “a new file system” will go in the direction of a metadata enabled one, obviously because the current HFS+ has almost all of a modern file systems aspects like journaling etc.

Well, we’ll see and most probably, Apple will leapfrog “Longhorn” long before it even appears on the market. If Microsoft achieved anything with all the rumours, it’s that they motivate anyone else to be first – and better:

It seems that the greatest challenge for Microsoft will be simulating the stability of Mac OS X.