Re: Hierarchical tag structure in SetFS

On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 01:06:44PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
> Come to think of it, perhaps people are going the wrong way
> about database file systems: implementing them on top of a
> conventional FS, giving useless names to the files under the
> database file system's control. Perhaps it would be better
> to have at the bottom an unorganised data store with only
> abstract identies for objects, and then have additional 
> systems on top of that providing names to things that need
> them: traditional hierarchical, setfs-style, whatever fits
> the application. Files could have names in multiple systems,
> and Not every file would need to have an identity in any of 
> these systems (except one providing access to the files with
> the meaningless identifiers in an uniform manner). 

And how do you ensure that every program can interact with every file?

Capability Systems provide a very good way through a pattern that has
started to be known as the "powerbox", plash[1] is an implementation for
GNU/Linux that looks as though it can replace the GTK file-open dialog
with one that would return a "capability" to the file rather than its
name.  It would be possible to extend this idea and make the plash file
chooser aware of different ways of finding files.


  Sam

 [1] http://plash.beasts.org/