Re: Feature freeze imminent

[[ sorry if you recieve this message twice, I sent it last time from an
address that isn't registered with the mailing list. ]]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 10:19:19PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
>   [2]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2006/03/01/T17_55_20/

I've thought a similar idea would be useful many times before.  GMail is
the closest implementation that springs to mind.  The idea of putting
the tags into a (partial?) ordering is interesting and I've not come
across it before.  Do you mind if I ask a few questions about it?

Having a poset of tags seems to imply that this ordering should exist
independently of the actual tagging of files.  From your example,
specifying that "foo" lives below "cfg".  This ordering should probably
exist independently of any files that have these two tags.  If so how do
you deal with bootstrapping this hierarchy; i.e. two programs (developed
independently) require two tags to have a different ordering?

One way to neatly sidestep this problem would be to remove the ordering
and just require the set of tags associated with each file to be unique.
As far as I can tell, the implementation wouldn't be too complicated,
store the tags associated with a file lexicographically sorted and
you can just use a hash table (probably not a hash table in a real
implementation but I hope you get the idea) for the uniqueness check.
Something else would be needed to search for files efficiently, but I
don't see why it couldn't be done close to O(log N) time if not too many
files were returned from a search.

I hope I've interpreted your note correctly!


  Sam