On 13 May 2008, at 07:56, Martin Langhoff wrote: > and that's it. It's a trivial thing, will work on any fs, on any OS, > no magic tricks needed. We can do fast searches on based on the > "documents metadata", and the only "slow" op is mounting a device > where the documents metadata is stale or missing. > > IMO, jg is hinting towards something like this. If something like this > is done in a way that it uses atomic ops most of the time (using an > idiom of "write to tmpfile, close and then mv" instead of > write-in-place) then we have something pretty much bulletproof, > failsafe, and fast. Or at least as fast as the kernel-level FS > implementation is.
Yes, this sounds a much more reasonable way forward for the DS, and we know it already **works_very_well**. It's the same approach Apple has taken with OS X. The GUI showing its metaphor for applications and documents objects, while the (relatively standard) POSIX file-system actually uses bundles (directories) as containers for all the various files that make up said application, or a multi-file document (say a text document with imbedded images, or a movie composition made of many clips). The cached index database (Spotlight) is stored at the root of each file-system in a hidden dot folder and can be rebuilt as needed from the actual file content; it can even be omitted for certain mountable volumes if desired. You can happily use standard command line tools to grep, sed, awk, scp, vim, whatever – or use the high level GUI tools; and actually a fair few of those GUIs are just wrappers calling the standard command line tools. --Gary _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
