On 17:44 Wed 12 Jul , Hubert Chan wrote: > I thought this may be interesting to the people on the list. > > I was pointed to the GLScube project (http://www.glscube.org/), which > tries to implement semantic storage in usesrpace. GLScube (GLS^3) > stands for GNU/Linux Semantic Storage System. It provides a C++ API for > programmers to use, and also exports a virtual filesystem (glscubefs) > using FUSE, so that legacy applications can take advantage of its > functionality. It performs incremental indexing (I assume using > either inotify or dnotify). > > It is licensed under the GPL and can be downloaded from their website. > Unfortunately, the 0.1 tarball that I downloaded doesn't seem to include > Makefiles, so I'm not sure how to build it. > > They also have video demos available on the site. > > I think that what makes this more interesting to ReiserFS people, > compared to, say, Beagle, is the glscubefs, which allows legacy > applications to take advantage of GLScube functionality. Although we'll > have to see how much functionality is actually exposed through glscubefs > (i.e. can we do everything from the commandline?). > > -- > Hubert Chan - email & Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ > PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA (Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net) > Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA It's an interesting project, and we as much as anyone appreciate their efforts to integrate semantics into legacy applications through a virtual FS, but I don'te see anything in the demonstrations or whitepaper to benifit the Reiser4 project. Why build a virtual filesystem to store semantic data when it can be built into an actual one? The one benefit I see is they may be able to do more with search optimization in their design, but only at the expense of space. If Reiser4 has a clever design for metadata storage, though, even that will be easly bested.
I do like their careful reliance only on standard tools like inotify FUSE and Lucene to implement their design, instead of writing a bunch of redundant code and their interest in backwards compadability through a virtual FS---it has the chance to bring non-heriarchical storage to some, but it lacks the careful planning that has gone into the discussion of the metadata plugin I've seen on the mailing list alone. --Clay Barnes
