> erm, having a db as your filesystem won't necessarily make > your directories go away. given that we have organized data > in directories since who knows how long that paradigm is sure to stay. True - but I can see a feature being "hey, don't worry about where your files are, just describe them as 'picture of baby' and I'll put it someplace" Makes back up a bit of a nightmare potentially.
I'd be most worried that searching a large full harddisk would be much the same as searching the web now - you pull up a whole lot of crap for the 1 useful thing you get. > it will increas the amount of ways you can search your data. > consider emails. you want to search them by sender or subject > maybe. currently to do that your mailprogram has to read the > whole mailbox, which, if you have lots of mails, and more so > if you are using maildir, can take a lot of time. True - but who's job is it to know how to seach email, the FS or the mail reader? A FS should be, IMHO, pretty separate from the data that is stored on it. Unless the meta-data for each file is very good, then searching may be useless. Eg, I have a directory of images called "pictures\friends" and I haven't got around to naming the pictures yet. It's going to be hard to search for them. > a db filesystem really just means the ability to have > aribitrary metadata on your files, and more efficient ways to > search for that. Yeah. But is it _more_ effort to enter the meta-data than just put it in a sensible directory I think that this has the potential to cause far more pain & confusion (especially among the home users) than a regular FS. For example, Nana has never used a computer & you teach her about this fancy search thing that helps her find her files. What happens when the search thing can't find the email she sent to aunt Daisy? Most home users that do the occasional doc that I know would like to have everything in a flat directory & manually scroll through the files to find it. Brad
