Leo Comerford wrote on Mon, 16 May 2005 13:32:19 +0100: > Probably the biggest barrier is the fact that it's nigh-impossible to > take a specific (non-directory) file and find its pathnames! We need > the ability to do this for any file, directory or otherwise, and for > all types of pathnames applied to the file.
Not imposible with doubly linked directory entries, rather than the traditional single links. Been there, done that, the price is performance, which we can now afford due to modern hardware? > So a relation-directory can express arbitrary relationships between > files. It's a bit like the relational model's weakly-typed sister, > where /(something)/description is a table, aardvark: is a row, and > ~/photos/dessau-bauhaus is aardvark's entry in the column > /(something)/description/(the various relation-directories):described. > In OOese, /(something)/description is an association, aardvark: is one > of the links of that association, and (the various > relation-directories):described is a role name. (At least, that's the > Rumbaugh-Blaha-Premerlani-Eddy-and-Lorensen version; the UMLese may > vary.) As for the rest of your ideas, let me sum up what I think you're talking about, please correct me if I got it wrong: Group similar files together by linking them from a common parent directory (files are allowed to have multiple parents) - which serves mainly to give them an association. You had a colon in the directory name to mark that functionality, though it could just be a regular directory in all but name. Or is it about adding relations by attaching sub-files to give more info about something? So if I have a photograph of my aunt's cottage, I'd like to file it in a directory for "Cottage" stuff and another one for "Aunt" things. But when I want to add a descriptive text file, I'd rather have it as a kind of attribute attached to the photo - making the description a sub-file of the photo (treating the photo "file" as a directory) so that it is preserved when I move the photo "file" around. The alternative of having a special description association directory for all files that have the same description seems kind of awkward (there's usually only one file per description). Are both methods useful? Yup. What's the difference between associations and properties? Many-to-one and one-to-one? Actually both can exist in the file system - when you do a directory listing of a thing (the photo "file"), you get the subfile listing (the text description file's name) and the parent directories listed too (like ".." in regular directory listings, but you'd have ..photos and ..aunt). And then there are ReiserFS plugins, which might give you a magic directory that when read for data, yields the concatenation of its children's data contents. > On the other hand, garbage collection will be a significant hurdle, > for two reasons. One is cycles. [...] The other is more > sophisticated needs for automatic deletion. Neither are impossible, we just have to pay the performance price for the luxury features. - Alex P.S. Here's the example warped into an Unix style file system, with dynamically generated fake symbolic links for things that wouldn't fit (like multiple parent directories). To get the world to accept files as directories and other novelties, we may have to use something like this for the transition from old to new: Example: total 2 drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 2 May 16 21:06 . drwxrwxrwx 0 agmsmith agmsmith 7 May 16 21:06 .. drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 1 May 16 21:09 Aunt drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 1 May 16 21:08 Photos Example/Aunt: total 1 drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 1 May 16 21:09 . drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 2 May 16 21:06 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 agmsmith agmsmith 1 May 16 21:09 NewBackStairs -> /RAMDisk/Example/Photos/NewBackStairs Example/Photos: total 1 drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 1 May 16 21:08 . drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 2 May 16 21:06 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 agmsmith agmsmith 2 May 16 21:08 NewBackStairs Example/Photos/NewBackStairs: total 202 drwxr-xr-x 2 agmsmith agmsmith 2 May 16 21:08 . drwxr-xr-x 1 agmsmith agmsmith 1 May 16 21:08 .. lrwxrwxrwx 0 agmsmith agmsmith 2 May 16 21:09 ... -> /RAMDisk/Example/Aunt -rw-r--r-- 1 agmsmith agmsmith 29 May 16 21:08 Description.txt -rw-rw-rw- 1 agmsmith agmsmith 204641 May 14 15:40 ImageData.jpeg
