On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 05:02:39PM +1300, Brad Beveridge wrote: > > 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.
a FS should provide efficient access to the data stored on it. it is impossible to handle maildir efficiently for searching, unless you keep searchable metadate in a seperate place. have you tried and measured how long it takes mutt to open a maildir with 100000 mails? > Unless the meta-data for each file is very good, then > searching may be useless. true, but that does not mean the feature should not be there. > Yeah. But is it _more_ effort to enter the meta-data than just put it > in a sensible directory how often do i need to repeat this? the m�tadata is ADDITIONAL to the directory structure, repeat after me, directories WILL NOT!!! go away. (they can't, unix would not work without directories) you can put your files in sensible directories AND have metadata. > I think that this has the potential to cause far more pain & confusion > (especially among the home users) than a regular FS. no, they will never notice. the user will not have to do a thing. this will all be automated. when a mail arrives the mail-delivery agent will take the metadata and store it in the fs. image programs will safe the image comment and format. this is not a user thing, but a feature for applications to make use of. the user will only see that mutt opens the mailbox much faster, and that the same search commands you have been using all the time to find your mails, will improve. fortunately for you in linux old stuff tends to stay around for a while, so a new database fs is not going to make ext2 go away. i want a filesystem based on an object database, with efficiently searchable metadata and the ability to have virtual directories (that are created from search queries) so that i can use the query feature with applications that do not understand it. unfortunately there is no hope for that before 2.8 (as 2.6 is almost out the door already) greetings, martin. -- interested in doing pike programming, sTeam/caudium/pike/roxen training, sTeam/caudium/roxen and/or unix system administration anywhere in the world. -- pike programmer working and travelling in europe open-steam.org unix system- bahai.or.at iaeste.(tuwien.ac|or).at administrator (stuts|black.linux-m68k).org is.(schon.org|root.at) Martin B�hr http://www.iaeste.or.at/~mbaehr/
