On 03/08/2012 19:18, tlaro...@polynum.com wrote:
Hello,
This is mainly a theoretical question.
While playing with the representation of mathematical definitions as
a file hierarchy (at dot you find a DESC or whatever named file with
the description, and the subdirs are simply more restrictive
instances of the thing; say : collection -> magma -> monoïde ->
group etc.), it is soon obvious that a filesystem is a one dimension
thing: you only follow one string. Multiple "parents" at the same
level are not there.
One could trick partly using hard or soft links. But with always the
same problem: who is dot-dot, in a case where multiple parents are
here? And multiple parents are not, to my knowledge, supported by
kernel filesystem code. Manipulating the namespace is not the same.
Has someone ever played with the notion of a multidimensional
filesystem, where '/' is the origin, the nodes would be some
representation of (a, b, c,...) (even negatives perhaps), each node
having a name (user defined one by the way), and if a node is, say
(3, 0, 1,...) this means that it is to be found as the third subdir
of the (1, 0, 0,...) path etc., (In this scheme, if there is no link
(no path) from another notion, it is another dimension).
Just for intellectual curiosity.
Best,
Hi,
As far as I understand, it seems you are interested in the idea of views
over your files. Something that has been approached as "non-hierarchical
file systems". But the complexity of handling such graphs often seems to
be the reason why these projects failed. Not to mention how the pain to
adapt them to the existing systems that are strictly hierarchical.
In a project we presented in iwp9 6e (2011), we introduced the design of
a filesystem that stores files (stream or hierarchy of files) in
/records/ on a WORM file system (Venti). Records are stored in sequence,
as they arrive (in respect to their recording order). Each record is
identified by your username 'u', the repository name 'h' (for host) and
an index related to time 't' (that is not time, but a self incremented
interger linked to the date in the current calendar). Each triplet
{u,h,t} is uniquely linked to a Venti SHA-1 score. That is the ground level.
On top of that, you are free to point files to build any view on them
and store these views again in new records, using any naming convention
you like at this moment. A non intrusive hypertext language can be
used to write a log book from were you point the files you stored in
records. From this log book, you can do literate programming, run
scripts on files, etc. (For the moment, Emacs org-mode seems to be a
good hyper-text language to start from.)
A third component, a "triplet" indexer, helps you to find which records
points to other records, an vice versa. A plain text search engine
helps you to retrieve text from the past. All is centered on traceability.
We spent a lot of time studying reference bibliography from the 60s to
today and already have plans for implementation of the ground level
file system on top of Venti.
Hope this will interest you, at least "just for intellectual curiosity"!
;-)
Nicolas
