Re: Hierarchical tag structure in SetFS

On 2007-03-02, Sam Mason <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't know if I've moved too far away from your idea for the
> differences to be reconciled, I hope I haven't and we can bring things
> back together again.

I think you're much closer to the usual metadata-based DB file 
systems than my approach, especially as you don't care about 
persistent search results, which is fundamental to my idea: if
I didn't care about them, any metadata-based DB FS might do it.
But having to use some arcane (numeric) identifiers for persistent 
access to files instead of their paths drifts too much away from 
unixland into WIMPland. Now, there could be advantages to working
with abstract objects intead of paths, and maybe nice command line
interfaces could be designed for that, but it's not going to happen
in such a time scale that setfs can be implemented in. It would take
decades. So I want something that works with existing tools: setfs.

I think you're also still confusing the notion of a tag on setfs,
and meta-data tag: you're thinking too much in terms of providing
lots of description (metadata) for a file, and too little in terms
of simply removing the order from unix path names, and providing a
non-hierarchical identity. Yes, deciding on an identity for a file
can demand a bit of effort, and it is not always clear, but it 
should be easier to decide on an non-hierarchical identity than a
hierarchical one in at least some use cases. I think organisation
of random notes could be one of those, and that's why I want to try
this in riot.

-- 
Tuomo