On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:10:04 EST, Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > And document files too. I'm looking forward to being able to being able > to scrap this strange hierarchy system that I'm currently using for all > my documents. Email, too, would do well with this system. Just toss > all the mail in a single folder, and have your MUA query the filesystem > for mails from the ReiserFS list, or mails from friends, etc.
Ad-hoc query support in the file system (or even in user space) is always a problematic issue, because there's so many corner cases that result in a DWIM interface problem. For example: If you query your music filesystem for Eric Clapton, should it return "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by the Beatles? If you ask it for "songs written by the artist Prince", should it return "Manic Monday" by the Bangles (the album credit says "Christopher")? The music industry is *full* of that - and queries like that Just Don't Work unless your metadata is accurate. Bonus points for being able to handle "music by Metallica before they heaved Mustaine overboard and he went off to make Megadeth" - what year did he leave, and are the songs all *accurately* tagged for release dates? If some idiot in Zanzibar says "ooh shiny" and clicks on an attachment they shouldn't have, and starts spewing mail to you that has a friend's address in the From: field, should "mail from friends" find it? For that matter, how does my MUA know who "friends" are? I have some people that would count as "friends" who I correspond with on a much lower frequency than some idiots that I'd rather never hear from again (but have to deal with due to various obligations). Equally problematic is when an old college classmate drops me a note asking about our supercomputer, as an off-list reply to something I said on a security mailing list (actually happened recently). Is that a "security", or "friends", or "supercomputing", or "VT News", or all/ other? And how does it know, other than simple word-indexing schemes (I already use 'glimpse', but even that gets painful when your e-mail archive goes back 15 years and totals over a gigabyte - compound searches take *forever*. Semantic analysis is a royal pain - I can't expect the computer to be able to figure out meanings in order to classify them, when *I* can't do it (I have at least 10 or 15 pieces of mail that require a reply, but I haven't figured out yet what the fleep the author was talking about..)
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