>>>>> "Valdis" == Valdis Kletnieks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Valdis> On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 23:10:04 EST, Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Valdis> said: Hubert> And document files too. I'm looking forward to being able to Hubert> being able to scrap this strange hierarchy system that I'm Hubert> currently using for all my documents. Email, too, would do well Hubert> with this system. Just toss all the mail in a single folder, Hubert> and have your MUA query the filesystem for mails from the Hubert> ReiserFS list, or mails from friends, etc. Valdis> Ad-hoc query support in the file system (or even in user space) Valdis> is always a problematic issue, because there's so many corner Valdis> cases that result in a DWIM interface problem. Yes. When I wrote what I wrote, I was assuming that you have good metadata that the filesystem can use. I assume that semantic analysis, DWIM, mind reading, etc., is out of the scope of the filesystem layer, but anyone is free to implement a plugin that does what they want. So when I say "mails from friends," I'm skipping most of the details, which I think most people don't care about. I'm really saying that I would give the filesystem a list of email addresses of people that I consider "friends," and get the filesystem to find all mails from those addresses. If someone from Zanzibar starts flooding me with the virus-du-jour, then I refine my filter so that it excludes mails that clamav detects viruses in. (Actually, I would just configure clamav to delete all mails that contain viruses.) If my old college friend drops me a mail, and I decide I want his mails to show up in my "friends" query, then I add his email address to the list. (Or add him to my address book, mark him as "friend," and let the filesystem do the join.) (Actually, I don't think I personally would use a "mails from friends" query. I would generally just use a "mails to/from person x.") [...] Valdis> And how does it know, other than simple word-indexing schemes (I Valdis> already use 'glimpse', but even that gets painful when your Valdis> e-mail archive goes back 15 years and totals over a gigabyte - Valdis> compound searches take *forever*. Well, Reiser4(? - with the appropriate plugin?) will let you add arbitrary attributes through the everything-is-a-file-and-a-directory mechanism, so you can add, for example, a "tags" attribute. For all the mails dealing with supercomputing, you add the supercomputing tag. For all security mails (that aren't already handled by your security-mailing-list, etc. filters), you can add the security tag. Then you tell the filesystem that the "tags" attribute is a handy thing to index. Again, I'm assuming that the user provides the filesystem with useful metadata. I don't assume that the filesystem can read your mails and do automatic classification with 100% accuracy. -- Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.
